Umut Baysan

umut baysan
Departmental Lecturer in Philosophy
umut.baysan@philosophy.ox.ac.uk

See personal webpage: https://www.umutbaysan.org/ 
See college webpage: https://www.st-annes.ox.ac.uk/cpt_people/baysan-dr-umut/

 

I am a Departmental Lecturer in Philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy and St Anne's College, University of Oxford. I have held this position since 2017, though my position was linked to Merton College between 2019 and 2022. Previously, I worked as a University Teacher and a Postdoctoral Researcher in Philosophy at the University of Glasgow (2014-2017). My PhD is also from the University of Glasgow (2015). Before that I studied Philosophy (2008) and Cognitive Science (2011) at Middle East Technical University.

Articles 

"Truthmaker Puzzles for One-Level Physicalists", Synthese (forthcoming).

"Physicalism or Anti-Physicalism: A Disjunctive Account", Erkenntnis, forthcoming (with Nathan Wildman).

"Are Propositional Attitudes Mental States?", Minds and Machines, 2022.

"The Pursuit of Neutrality in the Metaphysics of Emergence", Analysis, 2022.

"Rejecting Epiphobia", Synthese, 2021.

"Causal Emergence and Epiphenomenal Emergence", Erkenntnis, 2020.

"Mad Qualia", The Philosophical Quarterly, 2019.

"Quidditism and Contingent Laws", Thought, 2019.

“Emergence, Function, and Realization”, in S.C. Gibb. et. al. (eds.), Routledge Handbook of Emergence, Routledge, 2019.

"Epiphenomenal Properties”, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 2018.

"Why Incompatibilism about Mental Causation is Incompatible with Non-reductive Physicalism" (With Jonas Christensen), Inquiry, (published online in 2018, printed in 2022).

“Must Strong Emergence Collapse?” (With Jessica Wilson), Philosophica, 2017.

“Lawful Mimickers”, Analysis, 2017.

“An Argument for Power Inheritance”, The Philosophical Quarterly, 2016.

“Realization Relations in Metaphysics”, Minds and Machines, 2015. See https://www.umutbaysan.org/research for a more comprehensive list including book reviews and other publications.

 

I specialise in philosophy of mind, metaphysics, and (a bit of) philosophy of science, working mostly in various intersections of these three areas (particularly inter-level metaphysics, the metaphysics of emergence, the mental causation debate with a focus on epiphenomenalism). I have broader research interests in meta-ethics (naturalism/non-naturalism), practical ethics (matters related to social justice), epistemology (epistemic justification), philosophy of cognitive science (group cognition), and social ontology (metaphysics of race).

Undergraduate: I teach tutorials in General Philosophy (1st year), Moral Philosophy (1st year), (102) Knowledge & Reality, (103) Ethics, (104) Philosophy of Mind, (125) Philosophy of Cognitive Science, and (128) Practical Ethics, and supervise undergraduate dissertations in these areas. For the Faculty of Philosophy, I have been giving the Practical Ethics lectures (since 2019) and previously taught the Philosophy of Mind lecture series I & II (2017-2019). Graduate: For the Faculty of Philosophy during the 2022-2023 academic year, I will teach Graduate Classes in Ethics (topic TBC). Previously, I taught Graduate Classes on Emergence (2019). I also teach tutorials for MPhil in Philosophical Theology (for the modules Philosophy of Mind & Action and Metaphysics & Epistemology), provide supervisions for BPhil in Philosophy, and have acted as 2nd supervisor for DPhil in Philosophy. (See also: https://www.umutbaysan.org/teaching for more details.)