Joyce Mitchell Cook ’55 was featured in a Feb. 27 Forbes article that recognized her achievements, including being the first Black woman to earn a Ph.D. in Philosophy in 1965.
At Bryn Mawr, Cook lived in Rockefeller dorm and studied Philosophy.
Cook went on to St. Hilda's College at Oxford and then Yale University, where she received her doctorate and became the first female teaching assistant in the department. She taught at Howard University, was a managing editor for The Review of Metaphysics, and worked as a speech writer for President Jimmy Carter.
Theodore McDarrah writes in Forbes:
"Cook did not widely publish in her lifetime. How much her race and gender play into this fact can only be left to interpretation, but we do know a bit of her philosophical viewpoints from her writings as a student and the classes she taught ... Her dissertation was on value theory, an ethical discourse on the theoretical questions of goodness and value that can be traced back to the Greeks. In turn, she became one of the first philosophers to discuss bioethics, ranging from topics on consent to experimentation on humans and animals. Along with philosophy of mind and Artificial Intelligence, bioethics is now one of the most prominent philosophical subdisciplines."
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