Faculty
Sari Kisilevsky
Associate Professor
Philosophy Department
Office: Powdermaker Hall 360G
Phone: 718-997-5202
sari.kisilevsky@qc.cuny.edu
Area of expertise: Philosophy of Law, Ethics, Just War Theory.
Sari Kisilevsky is associate professor of philosophy at Queens College. Her research focuses on philosophy of law and ethics. She received her J.D. (2000) and Ph.D. (Philosophy, 2008) at the University of Toronto, and spent a year as a Post-Doctoral Fellow in Philosophy at UCLA before joining the department at Queens College. Professor Kisilevsky’s primary interest is in the moral significance of law. What does the establishment of a legal system add to the moral landscape of a community, and what is morally important about a society holding people legally responsible to one another? These questions run through her work in analytic jurisprudence, on just war theory, and on Kant’s Doctrine of Right. She is currently working on the ethics of punishment, and the ways in which our practices of holding each other to account are constitutive of our moral community. She pays special attention to the fundamental challenge that criticisms of mass incarceration pose to traditional justifications for punishment, and what this means for the ways that people relate to one another in a society.