İoanna Kuçuradi (Ioanna Koutsouradi)

İoanna Kuçuradi died on Friday 2 October 2026 at the Maltepe University Faculty of Medicine Training and Research Hospital in Istanbul, where she had been receiving treatment. She was 89, two days short of her 90th birthday, which her students had planned to celebrate with an event on 10 October. No cause of death was made public.

Tributes came from across Turkish public life. The Speaker of the Grand National Assembly, Numan Kurtulmuş, said her philosophical approach, which placed human value and dignity at its centre, had left deep marks in Turkey and the world.

On 4 October, the day she would have turned 90, a ceremony was held in Maltepe University's Mimar Vedat Çakırca Conference Hall, attended by academics, students, her family and officials including the AK Party spokesman Ömer Çelik. The university's acting rector, Yusuf Aksar, called her the teacher of teachers. Her coffin was then taken to the Church of the Metamorphosis at the Şişli Greek Orthodox Cemetery, where Ecumenical Patriarch Bartholomew led the funeral service, and she was buried in the cemetery.

İoanna Kuçuradi, in Greek Ioanna Koutsouradi, was born in Istanbul on 4 October 1936 into a family of Greek descent. She attended the Zappeion Greek Gymnasium for Girls in Istanbul, finishing in 1954, and went on to study philosophy at Istanbul University. She graduated with a bachelor's degree in 1959 and earned her doctorate at the same university in 1965.

Kuçuradi began her academic career as an assistant professor at Istanbul University and at Atatürk University in Erzurum. In 1968 she joined Hacettepe University in Ankara, where she founded the Department of Philosophy and chaired it until 2005. From 1997 to 2005 she was the founding director of Hacettepe's Centre for Research and Application of the Philosophy of Human Rights and directed its master's and doctoral programmes in human rights. She held a UNESCO Chair of Philosophy from 1998.

In 2006 she moved to Maltepe University in Istanbul, where she taught philosophy and directed the Centre for Research and Application of Human Rights for the rest of her life. She was also a member of the board of trustees of Koç University.

Her influence extended far beyond the classroom. She was a founding member of the Philosophical Society of Turkey, its Secretary General from 1974 to 1980 and its President from 1980. In the International Federation of Philosophical Societies she sat on the steering committee from 1983, served as Secretary General from 1988 to 1998 and as President from 1998 to 2003, and was later its Honorary President. She was President of the Afro-Asian Philosophy Association from 2010 and President of the International Institute of Philosophy in Paris from 2014 to 2017, afterwards becoming its Honorary President. In public life she chaired the High Advisory Council for Human Rights of the Turkish prime ministry from 1994 to 1996, sat on the National Advisory Council for Human Rights from 2002 to 2005, chaired the Turkish National Committee of the UN Decade for Human Rights Education from 1997 to 2005, and was an observer at the European Monitoring Centre on Racism and Xenophobia in Vienna from 2004 to 2007.

Kuçuradi is credited with building academic philosophy in modern Turkey, through the department she founded at Hacettepe, the Philosophical Society of Turkey she led for decades and the students she trained. Internationally, she was one of the few Turkish philosophers to lead the world's main philosophical bodies. Her insistence that human rights rest on a philosophical understanding of human dignity, and her practical work in human rights education, shaped a generation of scholars, lawyers and teachers.

Her honours included the Goethe Medal (1996), the Turkish Academy of Sciences Prize (1996), honorary doctorates from the University of Crete and Ricardo Palma University in Lima, the Knight Commander's Cross of the Order of Merit of the Federal Republic of Germany (2001), an honourable mention for the UNESCO Human Rights Education Prize (2002), the UNESCO Aristotle Medal (2003) and honorary fellowship of the Science Academy of Turkey (2015). A bronze bust of her stands outside the Bodrum municipal building.