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Philosophy Department

Kim Leighton, Ph.D.
Assistant Professor of Philosophy

Contact Information:
Office: Robinson B456
Email:kleight1@gmu.edu
Phone: 703 993-9870

Office Hours:
Tues | 1:30-3:30 | and by appointment

Spring 2008 Courses:
PHIL 309 Medicine & Human Values (3)
Prereq: Completion or concurrent enrollment in all other
required general education courses
This course fulfills the University's synthesis requirement

Phil 309 001 | TR | 12:00-1:15 | 12532

Phil 309 002 | TR | 10:30-11:45 | 12533

Areas of Interest:
Kim Leighton was raised in the Boston area, and has spent much of her life in New York and Western Massachusetts. She received her BA from Sarah Lawrence College and her MA and PhD in philosophy from the University of Massachusetts. Her areas of research are social/political philosophy, continental philosophy, feminist philosophy, and ethics.

After finishing her dissertation on understandings of self-knowledge in modern and post-modern philosophy, she spent two years as a Mellon Humanities Postdoctoral Fellow at Cornell. There her work explored continental and analytic approaches to questions regarding the self, identity, and ethics. Her current research continues to interrogate the intersections of epistemology and moral and political philosophy as she examines the ways self-knowledge is operative in some of the key concepts of contemporary and modern political theory (e.g., agency, identity, autonomy, and authenticity). She is also interested in how knowledge productions about the self, the body, the psyche, and the human, motivate and limit political theory. Bringing bio-ethics and political philosophy together, one question she asks is: how might current sciences of identity such as genetics and genomics, and the ethical problems they purportedly raise, affect current political, social, and legal critique, particularly in regards to articulations of rights and freedom?