James E. Mahon

Biography

James E. Mahon is Professor of Philosophy and Head of the Philosophy Department at Washington and Lee University. He has taught at Duke University and Yale University. In 2003 he was a Visiting Scholar in the Faculty of Philosophy at the University of Cambridge. In 2006-07 he was a Visiting Fellow in the Department of Philosophy at Princeton University. In 2011-12 he was a Visiting Researcher at Yale Law School. In 2008 he served on the grant application panel for philosophy for the National Endowment for Humanities. In 2009-10 he was President of the Virginia Philosophical Association. He is a Life Member of Clare Hall, Cambridge.

Prof. Mahon’s primary research interests are in moral philosophy, especially the nature and scope of moral duties, the history of moral philosophy, especially Kant, Mill, and twentieth-century metaethics, and the intersection of law and applied ethics.

He is the author of Motivational Internalism and the Authority of Morality (2011), and his essays have appeared in What Happened in and to Moral Philosophy in the Twentieth Century? (2013), Contemporary Media Ethics (2013), The Philosophy of Deception (2009), Researching and Applying Metaphor (1999), and Metaphor and Rational Discourse (1997). His articles have appeared in the Encyclopedia of Lying and Deception, Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Kantian Review, Philosophy, The Journal of Value Inquiry, The International Journal of Applied Philosophy, and Studies in the History of Ethics.