Dr. Shlomit Wygoda Cohen


Areas of specialization:  Metaethics; Ethics


Areas of competence:Metaphysics, Wittgenstein,Philosophy of religion


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I completed a PhD in Philosophy at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem in 2020. My dissertation was titled ‘Contemporary Debates in Philosophy in Light of Particularism’. Moral particularism is the view that rejects two commonly held tenets. First, that moral principles play a crucial role in moral theory: namely, they are indispensable in determining what is right and wrong and in making moral judgments. And second, that the role of moral theory is to accurately codify the moral landscape. In my dissertation, I set out to develop implications of this unorthodox outlook. I did not do so by discussing direct implications of particularism, but rather by considering implications of the doctrine on which particularism relies – holism in the theory of reasons. According to holism, the valence of a reason is context dependent; something that is a reason in favor in one context could be a reason against or no reason at all in another. The implications discussed ranged from metaphysics to moral epistemology and metaethics. Before my PhD I completed an MA degree in Philosophy also at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem writing a thesis on The Development of Wittgenstein’s Philosophy of Ethics. Prior to that I received a BA in in Philosophy from the Open University of Israel.


Publications:

“Not All Partial Grounds Partly Ground: Some Useful Distinctions in the Theory of Grounding”, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research. 2020.

doi: 10.1111/phpr.12524

“Mind Nongroundedness vs. Mind Independence: Two Kinds of Objectivism“, Ethics. 2021 Oct 1;132(1):180-203. doi: 10.1086/715278

“Why Does God Command?”, Religious Studies. Forthcoming. doi: 10.1017/S0034412522000154