IDIL ÇAKMUR




About 


link to CV

contact: 
idilcak[at]sas.upenn[dot]com
I’m a Philosophy Ph.D. at the University of Pennsylvania, originally from Istanbul, Turkey. Before Penn, I studied Philosophy and Economics at Brown and briefly lived in New York as a “Chief Utopia Officer”--my favorite title yet.

Other than philosophy, I like to read fiction, watch films, and change haircuts often, apparently.



Research 


Areas of interest: 
ethics, aesthetics,social epistemology, 
feminist philosophy, existentialism, ancient philosophy


I’m curious about how we build a shared social world if we accept that we all live in “partly private, partly fabricated world”s, as Iris Murdoch would describe it. Especially nowadays, it’s hard to do justice to the difficulties in understanding one another and in embarking on joint projects, like a political community, if we underestimate the genuine and significant differences in how we each see the world. 

Losing a Perspective: Imagination as a Guide to Truth (draft) looks at how we can overcome these differences to start understanding others. Through Murdoch’s analysis of imagination, I argue that before we can learn of others’ perspectives, we have to lose our own. 

I’m also interested in how we can sense that enough is shared between us to know we can exist together. My public piece below looks at how “impolite conversation” might help, and I’m looking forward to examining the role of the aesthetic more generally in establishing a common ground--but, first, we have to understand what is distinctive about a genuine aesthetic practice.

Ethics of Body Aesthetics (draft) looks at the important ways conventional body beauty judgments are deficient as “aeshetic” practices, which partly explains their problematic nature. It also begins to show that as much as beauty can open us up to the reality of others, it also requires some prior openness to that reality to be appreciated. In a sense, then, the failures in our aesthetic lives are not so distinct from the ones in our moral lives.







Public Writing



I was a Marc Sanders 2024 Media Fellow in Longform Writing. 

In the past, I’ve received a grant from Effective Ideas for blog writing and a political theory fellowship from the Hudson Institute. 

 In my public facing work, I’m interested in exploring the things that concern individuals in their daily thinking of themselves, especially emotions, aspirations, and interpersonal relationships. I’m currently working on,

A Guide to Impolite Conversation: an essay about breaking norms in conversation to build connection, in Psyche.

The Good Unintended: reconsidering the good of breakups by turning to Plato and Iris Murdoch.