Professor İoanna Kuçuradi, Turkey’s leading philosopher of ethics and human rights, died in October 2026, shortly before her 90th birthday. Her work was guided by the conviction that philosophy has a vital purpose far beyond the academy and that people must learn to think and evaluate for themselves.

Born in Istanbul in 1936 to a Greek family, Kuçuradi studied philosophy at Istanbul University, where her doctoral thesis examined the concept of the human being in the works of Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. It was here that she studied and worked under the renowned philosopher Takiyettin Mengüşoğlu, himself a student of the German philosopher Nicolai Hartmann and a pioneer of philosophical anthropology in Turkey. Mengüşoğlu’s ideas were hugely influential for Kuçuradi and helped shape her approach; after he was dismissed during the upheavals created by the 1960 military coup, she moved on to Atatürk University in Erzurum, where she taught philosophy and Latin from 1965 to 1968.

In Erzurum she worked with students from social and cultural backgrounds very different from those she had known in Istanbul. “Erzurum is where I discovered Turkey,” she later recalled. Her new home gave her a fresh perspective on the uses of education, which she believed should cultivate the capacity to recognise values and act on considered judgements. This approach held particular resonance in those years of the Turkish Republic: education had long been understood as an instrument of social transformation. For Kuçuradi, the state’s purpose was not simply to govern its citizens or provide for basic needs, but to create the conditions in which they could become independent ethical individuals. A similar concern for human value underpinned her work on human rights. She understood these as ethical principles, protected by law.

Teaching gave her particular pleasure; she said she regarded her students as her own children. In 1969 Kuçuradi founded the philosophy department at Hacettepe University in Ankara, where she remained until 2003. Later, at Maltepe University in Istanbul, she established and directed a Human Rights Research and Application Centre and held a Unesco Chair in Philosophy and Human Rights. She founded the Philosophical Society of Turkey, whose mission is to bring philosophy out of the lecture hall and into public and personal life. She also translated works by Kant into Turkish, and in 1996 received the Goethe Medal for her contributions to philosophy.

Kuçuradi loved literature all her life. Her first book was, in fact, a collection of poems, Behind the Curtain, published in Greek in 1962.  The poems were only translated into Turkish in 2016, for a dual-language edition. Asked which book she would take to a desert island, she chose The Little Prince for its portrayal of friendship, though later suggested she might take Dostoevsky.

In her most famous work, İnsan ve Değerleri (Human Beings and Their Values), Kuçuradi argues that philosophy’s purpose is to evaluate the place and importance of human achievements in our lives. It should assess what art, science, technology and morality mean for humanity, as well as the problems which they give rise to. She described this as an effort to “guide humanity and the age”. Throughout her life, Kuçuradi sought to do precisely that: to bring philosophical thought to bear on the values by which we live, and to equip people to use it for themselves.