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Telling Young Comrades about Ioanna Kuçuradi

The Legacy, the Limits, and the Question Left to Us by the Philosopher Who Died Two Days Before Turning Ninety

Author: Oğuz Demirkapı
Telling Young Comrades about Ioanna Kuçuradi

A Life That Knew the Human Being as the Principal Value

Telling Young Comrades about Ioanna Kuçuradi

Prof. Dr Ioanna Kuçuradi, who made philosophy in Turkey into an institution, a discipline and a public voice, died on 2 October 2026 in Istanbul, at Maltepe University Hospital. On 4 October she would have turned ninety; on 10 October a symposium in her name was to be held, and that evening an Antigone dedicated to her was to be staged. In this piece we tell, first, who she was, then what she defended, and then, as Marxists, what we inherit from her and where we have to go on walking from the place she left. In one sentence: Kuçuradi told us "the human being is unconditionally the principal value"; we will go on asking under which social conditions this sentence can become real.

Dear Young Comrades,

Three days ago, on 29 September, in the piece Who Counts It as Moral?, we were reading Kuçuradi with you. We had taken up, as a tool against the class use of the concepts of loyalty, sacrifice and honour, the line a philosopher about to turn ninety drew between "what is counted as moral" and "what is ethical." While writing that piece we thought that a week later, at Boğaziçi, among her students and colleagues, she would celebrate her ninetieth.

Today, with the news announced by Cumhuriyet, we learned that we have lost her.

When we lose a thinker there are two easy paths. The first is to turn her into an icon and file down the thorns of what she said while alive; the second is to shrug and say "but she was not a Marxist." Both are laziness. Kuçuradi herself taught us another path: to grasp a thing's value not from the judgements loaded onto it by rote, but by knowing the thing itself. We will try to remember her in that way: knowing what she was, weighing what she left.

The tests of a life

We told the outline of Kuçuradi's life story in Who Counts It as Moral?. Rather than repeat the same information here, we propose to read that life from another angle: through where a thinker stood at the breaking points that followed one another in Turkey.

Istanbul, 1936–1959: From the Zappeion to philosophy

She was born on 4 October 1936 in Istanbul, the child of a Greek family. Wikipedia and FISP's biography record that she completed her secondary education in 1954 at the Zappeion Greek Girls' High School. According to Hülya Durudoğan's piece on bianet, she met philosophy there, in the second year of middle school, through Plato's dialogues Crito and the Apology. That is, through the story of a philosopher who died defending the voice of his conscience against the law of a city and of a state.

This detail has to be dwelt on. The year after she graduated from the Zappeion, on 6–7 September 1955, the houses, shops and churches of Istanbul's Greeks were plundered. She was eighteen. Then came the expulsions of 1964. Many Greeks of Kuçuradi's generation left this city; she stayed, wrote in Turkish, and built the institutions of philosophy in this country. In a place that was, in her own words, a "country of contradictions," she lived at the very centre of that contradiction.

In 1959 she graduated from the Department of Philosophy at Istanbul University and became the assistant of Takiyettin Mengüşoğlu, the pioneer of philosophical anthropology in Turkey. This tradition, which placed the question "what is the human being?" at the centre of philosophy, would give direction to her whole thought.

1960: The 147s and the piece "Person"

After the coup of 27 May 1960, the National Unity Committee removed from the university 147 academics, among them some of the country's best-known scientists. As a young assistant, Kuçuradi wrote a piece titled "Person" against this purge, and there she formed the sentence that would later be the summary of her whole philosophy: The point is "to be able to grasp that the human being is unconditionally the principal value."

She paid the price. She was counted unsuccessful in the assistantship exam and had to leave Istanbul for Erzurum, for Atatürk University. In 1965 she completed her doctorate at Istanbul University; but her first academic years passed outside "the centre," in the East.

This, dear young comrades, was the first test in which a thinker bound her thought not to a career calculation but to a principle. The coup administration presented itself as "progressive"; Kuçuradi said that a purge, from whoever's hand and on whatever grounds it comes, tramples the value of the human being.

Ankara, 1968–2003: Founding a department

In 1968 she moved to Hacettepe University, in 1969 she founded the Department of Philosophy, and she remained its chair until 2003. She was among the founders of the Philosophical Society of Turkey, established in 1974; she served as its general secretary from 1974 to 1980, and from 1980 until her death she was its president.

Look at the date: the year of 12 September. Associations were being closed, unions silenced, universities disciplined by the 1402 dismissals and by YÖK. Kuçuradi's presidency began in that very year, and through that dark decade the institution went on publishing and holding meetings without closing. Whether this was a compromise or a resistance can be debated; but one thing has to be granted: if philosophy in Turkey has an institutional continuity, a large part of it is owed to her stubborn labour.

The world stage: FISP and Istanbul 2003

Kuçuradi's name is better known outside Turkey than inside the country. From 1983 she sat on the board of the International Federation of Philosophical Societies (FISP); she was its secretary general from 1988 to 1998, its president from 1998 to 2003, and after 2008 its honorary president. From 2014 to 2017 she was president of the International Institute of Philosophy in Paris. From 1998 she held the UNESCO Chair in Philosophy and Human Rights.

During her presidency of FISP, in 2003, the XXI World Congress of Philosophy met in Istanbul under the title "Philosophy Facing World Problems." The idea that philosophy is not an academic game that turns its back on the world's problems, but an activity of knowledge that faces those problems, was what she defended all her life.

Closeness to the state, and its limit

Between 1994 and 1996 she chaired the Prime Ministry's High Advisory Council on Human Rights; in the early 2000s she sat on the National Human Rights Advisory Council and directed the National Committee for the UN Decade for Human Rights Education.

Here we have to be honest. The years 1994–1996 are the years when the emptying of villages, killings by unknown perpetrators and enforced disappearances were at their most intense in the Kurdish provinces. Sitting at the head of an advisory council in those years could not stop the state's war apparatus, and it did not. This has to be read not as Kuçuradi's personal fault, but as a structural limit of her theory of human rights. We will return to this limit below.

Maltepe, 2006–2026: The last twenty years

After 2006 she taught at Maltepe University and directed the Centre for Human Rights Practice and Research. Even at the end of her eighties she was chairing congress sessions, publishing books and training students. In 2023, as Cumhuriyet reported, she herself chaired the congress in Antalya on "Philosophy in Turkey in the 100th Year of the Republic."

The Goethe Medal (1996), the Turkish Academy of Sciences Award (1996), the UNESCO Aristotle Medal (2003) and the 28th Aydın Doğan Award, given in 2024, are only a few of the awards she received.

What did she defend? Four basic ideas

To fit Kuçuradi's philosophy into a few paragraphs would be unfair. But there are four ideas a young comrade needs to know before opening her books.

The human being is the being capable of creating value

This is the question Kuçuradi put at the head of everything: what distinguishes the human being from other beings? Her answer took shape inside the tradition of philosophical anthropology she inherited from Mengüşoğlu: the human being is the only being who has possibilities proper to herself, and who, by realising those possibilities, can create value. Knowledge, art, ethical action and technique are the products of these possibilities.

For this reason, according to her, the value of the human being is not a matter of "belief" or of "acceptance," but a matter of knowledge. Someone who knows what the human being is has to see everything that blocks these possibilities as a destruction of value. As the piece on bianet reports: in order to ground human rights one has to grasp that the human being is a being of value, because the human being is a producer of value.

Knowledge of value and a value judgement are not the same thing

In İnsan ve Değerleri (The Human Being and Her Values) and Etik (Ethics), written after her first books Schopenhauer ve İnsan (Schopenhauer and the Human Being) and Nietzsche ve İnsan (Nietzsche and the Human Being), Kuçuradi sharpened a distinction: to know the value of a thing is one thing; to assign it a value according to society's ready-made norms is another. The first rests on knowledge; the second is by rote.

In Who Counts It as Moral? we tied this distinction to the pair "what is counted as moral" and "what is ethical." What has to be added here is this: according to Kuçuradi, an ethical action can rest only on knowledge of the singular situation one is in. To apply a general rule blindly to every situation is not ethical; it is mechanical. Right action requires knowing the relations that make up the situation, and knowing what in that situation protects the value of the human being and what destroys it.

Human rights are not an ideal but a criterion

What made Kuçuradi known in the world is her philosophy of human rights. In İnsan Hakları: Kavramları ve Sorunları (Human Rights: Concepts and Problems) and in many other studies she defended this: human rights are ethical principles that express what the protection of the human being's value requires. They are not a "list of demands" or an agreement that changes with time; they are the criterion for measuring what states must do and must not do.

One consequence of this approach is hidden in the title of the book Adaletin Gerektirdiği Hukuk (The Law That Justice Requires): law does not legitimise itself; a statute in force, if it tramples the value of the human being, is not the law that justice requires. To set a criterion above positive law is a strong weapon against every defence of the form "the law says so."

Social injustice is a problem of human rights

This is less well known, and perhaps the idea that matters most for us. As Berfin Kart's 2016 study from Maltepe University summarises, Kuçuradi treats social injustice not only as a problem of economic distribution, but as "a philosophical, ethical and political problem." Justice, according to her, is an idea derived from cases of injustice, just as the concept of human rights is born from the observation of violations. And social injustice is "a problem concerning all the basic rights that can be protected only directly."

So hunger, the lack of shelter, unhealthy working conditions and exclusion from education are, in Kuçuradi's language, not "misfortunes" but violations of rights.

Two halves of the same sentence as Marx

Kuçuradi was not a Marxist; indeed she used the concept of "ideology" for every system of norms closed to questioning its own truths, and she did not keep Marxism outside this criticism either. But there is a surprising closeness here that young comrades need to know.

In 1844, in the introduction to A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right, Marx wrote this: criticism ends with the teaching that the human being is the highest being for the human being; that is, with the categorical imperative to overthrow all relations in which the human being is a debased, enslaved, abandoned, despicable being.

In 1960, at the age of twenty-four, Kuçuradi wrote that one has "to be able to grasp that the human being is unconditionally the principal value."

These two sentences share the same starting point: the value of the human being is a criterion above every kind of authority, tradition, state and "national interest." Where they part is the second half of the sentence.

For Kuçuradi the question is this: How is it possible to know the value of the human being, and to act according to this knowledge? For Marx the question is this: How are the relations that systematically trample the value of the human being overthrown?

The first turns toward knowledge and education; the second toward the relations of production and the class struggle.

"The reason we suffer is ignorance"

The sentence that shows this difference most clearly appears in the interview Kuçuradi gave Sözcü in 2016: "Why do we suffer? If I give a very short answer, I can say 'from ignorance,' and from the consequences that ignorance creates."

There is a deep share of truth in this sentence. Evaluation by rote, ready-made judgements, acting without knowing the situation really do produce great suffering. But as Marxists we have to add a question here: Who produces ignorance, why, and how?

A mining company does not skip safety measures because it does not know them, but because those measures lower the rate of profit. A government does not keep the worker below the hunger line because it does not know the line, but because it sets the minimum wage according to capital's competitive power. Here knowledge is not lacking; there is a property relation that blocks knowledge from being applied. And ignorance itself is often produced: the class structure of education, the division of mental and manual labour, and who owns the media and, today, the algorithms, determine who may know what and who may not.

Rights and the state

In 1843, in On the Jewish Question, Marx wrote that the "human rights" proclaimed by the bourgeois revolutions were in fact the rights of the member of bourgeois society, that is, of the egoistic human being in pursuit of his private interest. The right of property stood at the head of this list.

Kuçuradi is partly close to this criticism: she too does not equate the "rights" written into statutes with human rights, and she sets justice above law. But she stops at one point: she sees the state as the primary agent charged with protecting human rights. She builds a philosophy that reminds the state of what it ought to be.

The limit here appears concretely in the Prime Ministry council of 1994–1996. The state is not a neutral referee standing above classes, which will act rightly once it is rightly informed. It is the apparatus for protecting a given order of property. To remind it of what human rights require is valuable, and necessary; but it is not sufficient. For rights to be protected in fact, the social relations that have an interest in violating those rights have to be changed.

Kuçuradi's thesis that "social injustice is a problem of human rights" comes right up to this door. To open the door, that is, to look at the source of this injustice, the private ownership of the means of production, is the work left to us. In Artificial Intelligence and the Misery of Human Rights we tried to tie Kuçuradi's idea of "realising possibilities" in exactly this direction, to the question of how the digital monopolies seize the human being's possibilities.

What do we take from the legacy, and where do we go on walking?

The way to remember a life neither by making an idol of it nor by spending it is not, of course, to set it out in a table. But so that it may serve young comrades as a compass, we propose a pairing like this:

What we inherit from KuçuradiThe direction in which we will walk on from where she left
The human being is unconditionally the principal value; no state, tradition or "interest" stands above this.To name, by its name, the order of exploitation that is the common source of the relations which systematically trample this value.
Value is not a matter of belief but of knowledge; relativism is not a refuge.To ask in whose hands knowledge is gathered, and from whom it is withheld; to defend knowledge as a commons.
Ethical action requires knowledge of the singular situation; to apply a rule by rote is not ethical.To add that no knowledge of a situation can be complete without seeing the class relation among the relations that make the situation up.
The law that justice requires stands above the statute in force.To defend this criterion above the law not in the courtroom but with organised social power.
Social injustice is a violation of human rights.Not to separate social injustice from the question of property; to see a right not as a favour but as a gain of struggle.
Philosophy has to be organised as an institution, a congress, a journal, a department.To carry philosophy out of the university's walls and into the workplace, the neighbourhood and the union.
"Give us four lessons, and in 20 years there will be a different Turkey."To demand the philosophy lesson in schools as a right; but also to ask whom the school itself serves.
The labour of institutions

We want to pause a little on the last two rows of the table, because this is perhaps the side of Kuçuradi that is most often missed.

Philosophy is not only writing books. Founding a department, keeping an association on its feet for forty-six years, running an international federation, organising a congress, training young researchers, carrying on a publishing programme: all of these are an invisible, tiring, unrewarded labour. Kuçuradi gave this labour all her life.

In our guide Event Organizing and Comradeship we asked "how does one who cannot organise among one's own change the world?" However different Kuçuradi's political choices were from ours, the answer she gave to this question in practice is a lesson for us too: thought lives across generations only when the institutions that will carry it are organised.

A note to ourselves

This summer, on 7 June, in the piece Reason and Praxis Against the Sophistries of Despair, we told Kuçuradi as "a contemporary Antigone." We stand behind the comparison: as a voice defending the value of the human being against the law of the state, the name suits her. But in that piece we presented her almost as a guide to revolutionary praxis, and we did not show the limits of her theory enough.

To love a thinker is not to make her resemble us. To say it by Kuçuradi's own criterion: to know her value is more respectful than to load a value onto her by rote. In the piece of 29 September we had begun to set this balance; in this piece we have tried to carry it on.

Antigone on stage, this time without her

Kemal Demirel's Antigone, published in 1966 and dedicated to Kuçuradi, was, according to the programme Cumhuriyet announced on 1 October, to be staged on the evening of 10 October at the Boğaziçi Culture and Arts Centre in Sarıyer, at the close of the symposium arranged for her ninetieth birthday. The programme reported by Sahneden.net began in the morning with her view of ethics and value, continued with human-rights education, and closed in the evening with this play.

Philosophy all day, Antigone in the evening. A programme designed as a birthday celebration will now be a farewell.

Sophocles' Antigone defends, against Creon's law, the right to bury her brother, and pays for it with her life. But the real tragedy of the play is that Antigone is alone: her sister Ismene is afraid, the people of Thebes are silent. Antigone has the right, but she does not have the power.

Kuçuradi taught us what the right is. What falls to us is not to leave the right to the conscience of a woman alone, but to make it the business of an organised power. What will save Antigone from tragedy is the people of Thebes who do not stay silent.

Concrete tasks

A piece of remembrance should not end only in sorrow. Our proposals to young comrades, for keeping the legacy Kuçuradi left alive, are these:

  • Read her, and do not make do with what is read about her. To begin, The Human Being and Her Values, then Ethics, then Human Rights: Concepts and Problems. The more recent Morality, Ethics and Ethicses offers a short and dense introduction. At the end of every chapter, ask this question: "Where, among the relations that make up this situation, is class?"
  • Follow the 10 October programme. Watch the announcements of the Philosophical Society of Turkey to see whether the symposium turns into a meeting of remembrance; those who can go should go, listen and ask questions.
  • Set up reading circles. Discuss Kuçuradi's idea of "knowledge of the singular situation" through a case from your own workplace or school: a dismissal, a disciplinary investigation, a decision of censorship. What do we know, what do we not know, who is preventing us from knowing?
  • Document violations together with class. When you record a violation of rights, write not only "what happened" but also "to whose benefit it happened." Apply Kuçuradi's idea of social injustice to concrete cases in a union bulletin or a student magazine.
  • Use her criterion in debates on the ethics of artificial intelligence. The texts that monopolies present today as "ethical principles" are most often values loaded on by rote. As we did in The Poverty of Artificial Intelligence Ethics and Human Dignity and A Soul for the Machine, the Bill for the Worker, ask: "whose possibilities does this principle widen, and whose possibilities does it seize?"
  • Demand the philosophy lesson in schools. Raise Kuçuradi's words, "give us four lessons in pre-university teaching, and in 20 years there will be a different Turkey," at a parents' meeting, in a student assembly, at a meeting of an education union.

Knowing the Human Being as the Principal Value

Dear young comrades,

Ioanna Kuçuradi was born in Istanbul as a Greek girl; she saw the pogrom, the coups, the purges, the expulsions; she chose to stay, to write, to build. In 1960, as a twenty-four-year-old assistant, she said "the human being is unconditionally the principal value," and she paid the price of this sentence. Until she left us two days before turning ninety, she did not step back from it.

We did not stand in the same place as her on every question. She looked for the way of knowing the value of the human being in knowledge and in education; we think that this knowledge can become real for all human beings only when the relations based on exploitation are overthrown. But the place we start from is the same: there is no criterion higher than the value of the human being.

We take this sentence over from her. To complete it in the language of class, of labour and of organisation is our work.

May she rest in light. Her thought will live with those who go on discussing it.

Sources

The news of her death, and the programme for her ninetieth

Biography

Interview and assessments

From Kuçuradi's works

  • Schopenhauer ve İnsan (Schopenhauer and the Human Being)
  • Nietzsche ve İnsan (Nietzsche and the Human Being)
  • İnsan ve Değerleri (The Human Being and Her Values)
  • Etik (Ethics)
  • İnsan Hakları: Kavramları ve Sorunları (Human Rights: Concepts and Problems)
  • Adaletin Gerektirdiği Hukuk (The Law That Justice Requires)
  • Ahlak, Etik ve Etikler (Morality, Ethics and Ethicses)

Marxist classics

  • Karl Marx, On the Jewish Question (1843)
  • Karl Marx, A Contribution to the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right: Introduction (1844)

Related pieces at Knowledge Commons

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