KARDELEN KUCUK

Doctoral Student;
Department of Philosophy, Western University

Biography

Kardelen Kucuk is a doctoral student in philosophy at Western University. Before joining Western, she received a B.A. in philosophy from Middle East Technical University (2018) and an M.A. in philosophy from Bilkent University (2020).

Her primary areas of interest are philosophy of emotions, philosophy of psychology, and philosophy of mind.

Research

My primary research interests are at the junction of philosophy, psychology, and neuroscience. I am especially interested in questions whose focus is emotions. These include questions like “In what ways emotions differ from one another and are these distinctions correspond to genuine divisions of the world, representing the world’s causal structure?”, “How or in what degree neuroscientific data can shed light on the divisions between emotion categories?”, “How intentionality of emotions can be explained through representational theories of mind?”, and “Is there a way to analyze the phenomenal aspect of emotions in a scientific way?”. I advocate the thesis that emotions can be identified with their distinctive phenomenal properties which represent their intentional content. I would like to further my study on emotions by continuing to elaborate on this claim and complementing it by a proper scientific understanding. I also have a special interest in the issues in the philosophy of cognitive science such as modularity and neural representation.