Eylem Özaltun

After receiving my B.Sc, in Mathematics, I switched to Philosophy and completed my Ph.D. in Philosophy in 2013 at Harvard. My dissertation, “Knowledge in Action,” investigates the role of reason and self-knowledge in acting intentionally, and was written under the supervision of Sean Kelly, Richard Moran, and Matthew Boyle. In addition to my dissertation supervisors, Charles Parsons, Warren Goldfarb, and Douglas Lavin influenced my thinking a great deal during my graduate work. John McDowell and Charles Travis were key influencers outside of Harvard. I work on philosophy of mind, with a focus on action because (as O'Schaughnessy puts it) the phenomenon of bodily action set in a public and physical environment is a particularly appropriate place to focus to study mind in this materialistic age. My earlier research was on the possibility of acting, by itself, to be a way of acquiring knowledge of the objective world - so I worked on the object of the agent's non-observational knowledge. My current research lies at the intersection of philosophy of mind and philosophy of language, and investigates self-consciousness both in action and perception and the use of the first-person pronoun in expressing such consciousness. In this investigation I focus on Kant, Frege, Wittgenstein and Anscombe.