Brief overview of my career

I studied law in French and German Universities, and specilized in International Public Law and Human Rights. I started off as assistant lecturer at Marmara University in Istanbul and later developed a career in the international cooperation sector. I worked on European projects in Paris and Warsaw, before turning to a humanitarian approach with several NGOs, working in countries such as Chad, Afghanistan, Serbia, and Egypt. The projects covered economic development, agriculture and public health, often for the benefit of refugees or displaced persons. I had the chance to  study and work in over 15 countries. The diversity of cultures and persons met, were as enriching as the various fields of activities covered.

Thought path

With a long running interest in ancient philosophy and in the works of writers such as Henri Bergson, Simone Weil, Raymond Aron, Werner Jaeger and Hannah Arendt, and at a distance from my essentially legal academical background, I more recently studied the French and German Socio-anthropology schools (including Levy-Strauss, Bourdieu, Kraus, Marcuse, Benjamin, Adorno, and Habermas).

Through the years came also the discovery of Ludwig Wittgenstein, more as a guide to think than as a provider of answers, which led to the always renewed pleasure of following Jacques Bouveresse, Clément Rosset, Stanley Cavell, or Giorgio Agamben. With different approaches, other analysts influence me, and in particular James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, and Philip Roth.

Those writers also illustrate the importance of what is usually classified as litterature when it comes to understanding others and ourselves.

The work of historians is also an essential source on those matters. In that scope, my special interest in Hellenic and Medieval arts, brought me to the works of Paul Veyne, Maurice Sartre, Henri-Irénée Marrou, Georges Duby, and Jacques Le Goff, but also closer to our times, to periods studied for example by Svetlana Alexievitch.