İoanna Kuçuradi

İoanna Kuçuradi was born in Istanbul on 4 October 1936 into a Greek Orthodox family. In a 2021 interview with Sarkaç for the Science Academy Portraits series, she said she had little interest in family genealogy, yet she described her parents clearly: her mother was born in Çorum and brought to Istanbul at age four when the family had to leave; her father was born in Istanbul to a family from the island of Chios (Sakız). Childhood homes were in Taksim opposite the German Hospital, then Parmakkapı Street, then Tepebaşı.

She remembered little play. On her first school day she was punished for clapping after children gathered fallen olives, an episode that, she later said, taught her what a teacher must not do. The family lost property under the 1942 Wealth Tax. During the 6-7 September 1955 attacks on Istanbul's non-Muslim communities, they were on Kınalıada. These experiences of minority life in the Republic formed the unspoken background to a career spent arguing that human rights protect persons as members of the human species, not as members of favoured groups.

Kuçuradi graduated from Zappeion (Zapyon) Girls' High School in 1954 and entered Istanbul University's philosophy department, completing her undergraduate degree in 1959. She worked as a candidate assistant under Takiyettin Mengüşoğlu, the philosopher who shaped her early formation. Her 1965 doctoral thesis examined the problem of the human being in Schopenhauer and Nietzsche.

After the 27 May 1960 coup, Mengüşoğlu was among the 147 academics removed from universities. Kuçuradi's assistantship was never regularised; examiners gave conflicting marks and colleagues blocked her path. Rather than wait indefinitely, she accepted a post at the new Atatürk University in Erzurum in 1965. The move, she later said, was not exile but an education in the country she would spend her life teaching.

From 1965 to 1968 Kuçuradi taught in Erzurum. In 1968 she joined Hacettepe University in Ankara. Emel Doğramacı informed her that a philosophy department had been founded and that she was its chair. Kuçuradi built the department from scratch, studying foreign programmes but adapting them to Turkish conditions, emphasising philosophical problems over a pure history-of-philosophy sequence. She chaired the department until retirement in 2003, became associate professor in 1970 and professor in 1978, and founded Hacettepe's Centre for Research and Application of the Philosophy of Human Rights (from 1997), with a UNESCO Chair established within it in 1998.

In 1974 she helped found the Philosophical Society of Turkey after a World Congress of Philosophy in Varna where Turkey had no representation. She served as secretary-general (1974-1980) and as president from 1980. At FISP she was on the steering committee from 1983, secretary-general 1988-1998, president 1998-2003, and later honorary president. From 2006 she taught at Maltepe University and directed its human-rights centre and programmes, remaining a public voice on ethics, education, and rights into her late eighties.

Kuçuradi kept her private life deliberately out of public view. In the Sarkaç interview she said that outside work she mostly saw colleagues, that she disliked idle talk, and that "my private life is nobody's business." No spouse or children are documented in reliable public sources.

She identified strongly with teaching. Former students and even students of students continued to visit her. One former pupil brought from Germany a painting Kuçuradi had praised decades earlier. She lived and worked for decades between Ankara and Istanbul academic communities, and in later years her office at Maltepe University's human-rights centre was filled with papers, posters, and books. She remained active as a lecturer and interviewee past the age of 85.

Kuçuradi's core claim was that evaluation must not be confused with cultural "value judgments." She distinguished value attribution (judging something by whether it serves one's interest), ready-made value judgments (group norms of good and bad), and correct evaluation (understanding, situating, and assessing with value knowledge). Ethics, for her, is knowledge, not fashion or tribal morality.

She treated human rights as ethical principles that should ground law and state institutions before violations occur, not merely as remedies afterward. She criticised equating freedom with "doing whatever one wants so long as others are not harmed," arguing that people also harm themselves and others through ignorance of connection (her pandemic example: "this body is mine" protests that ignore contagion). She opposed the death penalty as a violation of the right to life and worked with the International Commission against the Death Penalty. She insisted philosophy belongs in schools: give her two classes for two years, she once said, and measure the difference twenty years later.

Kuçuradi's legacy runs through Turkish philosophy departments, human-rights education, and the Philosophical Society of Turkey she helped found and long led. Generations of students learned ethics from her Etik and İnsan ve Değerleri. Her UNESCO chair and centres at Hacettepe and Maltepe institutionalised philosophy of human rights as an academic field in Turkey. Internationally, her FISP presidency and honorary roles placed a Turkish woman philosopher at the centre of global philosophical organisations.

After her death on 2 October 2026, universities, human-rights groups, and public officials called her "hocaların hocası." AK Party spokesperson Ömer Çelik remembered that she taught philosophy as "the art of being human." Maltepe University said her thought and students would remain in its academic memory. Her funeral arrangements on 4 October 2026 at Maltepe University and Şişli Greek Orthodox Cemetery marked the end of a public life spent arguing that remaining human is a skill that can be taught.

Major recognitions included the Goethe Medal (1996), Turkish Academy of Sciences Prize (1996), honorary doctorates from the University of Crete (1996) and Ricardo Palma University in Lima (2000), Freedom of the Press Prize of the Journalists Association of Turkey (2000), Knight Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2001), UNESCO Human Rights Education Prize honourable mention (2002), UNESCO Aristotle Medal (2003), METU Parlar Foundation Science Award (2003), Planetary Humanist Philosopher's Award of the Council for Secular Humanism (2005), honorary fellowship of the Science Academy Society of Turkey (2015), METU Senate Special Award (2015), and the 28th Aydın Doğan Award (2024) for philosophy and human rights. She was also named an honorary member of PEN Turkey.

Principal books include Perdenin Arkası (poems, 1962), Max Scheler ve Nietzsche'de Trajik (1965), Nietzsche ve İnsan (1966), Schopenhauer ve İnsan (1967), Liselerimizde Felsefe Öğretimi (1969), İnsan ve Değerleri: Değer Problemi (1971), Etik (1977), Sanata Felsefeyle Bakmak (1980), Çağın Olayları Arasında (1980), Uludağ Konuşmaları (1988), Yüzyılımızda İnsan Felsefesi (1997), and Ahlak, Etik ve Etikler (2019). She translated Kant's Critique of Practical Reason, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, and Prolegomena into Turkish.

She was honour author of the 35th Istanbul Book Fair (2016); TÜYAP published a biographical volume, İnatla ve Umutla İnsan ve Değerleri Peşinde İoanna Kuçuradi. Late-career interviews included FluTV's Aydaki Adam with İlker Canikligil and Alper Hasanoğlu, Habertürk's Meseleler, NTV documentary segments, and the Sarkaç Science Academy portrait (2022).

Kuçuradi was not a scandal figure, but she took positions that unsettled peers. When YÖK circulated her Hacettepe curriculum as a model, other philosophy departments protested. She defended the need for a national quality framework even while many academics disliked YÖK. She publicly opposed the death penalty and argued that calling all ideas equally worthy of "respect" confuses respect for persons with evaluation of ideas. She criticised consumer culture, shallow "values education," and what she called "made-up philosophy" that cannot tell important claims from trivial ones. These were intellectual disputes, documented in interviews and essays, not personal controversies.

İoanna Kuçuradi died on 2 October 2026 at Maltepe University Faculty of Medicine Training and Research Hospital, where she had been receiving treatment. She was 89, two days short of her 90th birthday. The specific medical cause of death was not made public.

The Philosophical Society of Turkey announced a ceremony for Sunday 4 October 2026 at 11:00 at Maltepe University's Mimar Vedat Çakırca Conference Hall, with burial at 13:30 at Şişli Greek Orthodox Cemetery (Şişli Rum Ortodoks Mezarlığı) in Istanbul. Condolences came from Maltepe University, Çağdaş Yaşamı Destekleme Derneği, TBMM Speaker Numan Kurtulmuş, Presidential Communications Director Burhanettin Duran, AK Party spokesperson Ömer Çelik, and many academics and students.