Sari Kisilevsky
Positions held
| 2025-2026 to 2026-2027 | Invited researcher(s), Fundamental ethics |
Participation in CRÉ events
| 17 March 2026 | “Responsibility and Desert: Attribution and the Ethics of Personhood” |
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Biography
I am an Associate Professor of Philosophy at CUNY Queens College, where I specialize in ethics, philosophy of law, and political philosophy. I received my LLB and PhD from the University of Toronto, and my BA from McGill, where I first discovered philosophy. I was also a post-doctoral fellow at UCLA and a visiting professor at Princeton University, Hebrew University, and Tel Aviv University.
My research focuses on the nature of law, law’s moral significance, its role in shaping human society and our moral and political lives, and the nature of normativity or “bindingness” of rules that people give to themselves. I have written on issues of punishment, responsibility, legal judgment, rules and rule following (and application), and other related questions.
I also work on Kant’s political philosophy, especially Kant’s Doctrine of Right, and on Just War Theory, with a special focus on the War on Terror.
My recent work brings together these lines of research and focuses on Kant’s doctrines of war and peace. This work raises questions of the distinctive role of law in peace, and the moral value of peace more generally.
I also have recent work on responsibility and personhood, and the nature of instrumental value, and hard and easy cases. These projects (and more!) are my focus while visiting Montréal for the 2025-26 academic year. sari.kisilevsky@qc.cuny.edu
