Profile
Biography
I am currently employed part-time as a postdoc on Prof Sandrine Berges British Academy Funded project: Finding Diversity in Enlightenment's Philosophy's Attitude to Abolitionism while on leave from my continuing position in the philosophy department at Bilkent University, Ankara where I remain affiliated and continue to supervise graduate students. Before moving to Bilkent, where I have worked since September 2000, I was employed briefly at the universities of St. Andrews, Birmingham and Leeds. Prior to that I studied for a PhD at the University of Leeds, an MLitt at the University of St Andrews, a BA at the University of Oxford and spent a brief period as a visiting student at Ludwig-Maximilians-Üniversität in Munich. In 2025 I shall be a keynote speaker at the annual conference of ISOS, the International Social Ontology Society.
Research
Overview
I am interested in a range of issues in social and political philosophy and the philosophy of mind (especially philosophy of emotion), and have published work in Nous, Philosophical Studies, American Philosophical Quarterly and elsewhere. I am especially interested in philosophical questions about punishment - in particular non-standard or non-paradigmatic cases of punishment - and about collective agency and collective obligation. In 2016 I published a monograph 'An Expressive Theory of Punishment' with Palgrave MacMillan. I am currently editing a collection with Säde Hormio with the title 'Collective Responsibility: Perspectives On Political Philosophy from Social Ontology' which is due to appear in late 2024 and a further collection on collective agency in political philosophy which will appear in 2026.
Projects
While working on Professor Berges BA funded project I shall be concentrating on applying my knowledge of contemporary philosophical work on punishment and social ontology to a range of figures in the republican tradition. More generally, I remain interested in questions about non-paradigmatic instances of punishment and in particular the relationship between non-citizens and the criminal law and in the relationship between social ontology, political philosophy and the history of philosophy.
Supervision
I am currently supervising three PhD students at Bilkent working on topics in social ontology and political philosophy and have supervised Masters level work on just war theory and the nature of armies, on the philosophy of fiction and imagination, and on scientific realism, among other topics.
Teaching
Undergraduate
I have a wide range of teaching experience in a wide variety of institutions, at a number of different levels, across a broad range of areas of philosophy. A large part of my teaching has been in the history of political philosophy, but I have also taught upper year undergraduate courses on contemporary political philosophy, philosophy of mind, ethics, philosophy of language, philosophy of science, Kant's Critique of Pure Reason and seventeenth and eighteenth century metaphysics and epistemology.
