Thanks to the generous grants provided by Global Philanthropic Trust (GPT) and Network for a Free Society (NFS), in this 2013 Spring, ALT has been able to launch two Graduate Student Seminars concurrently. 

We have announced the programs concurrently as in this flyer . The announcement was made via the email groups and ALT’s social network as well as the flyers were mailed out to the faculties of economics, politics and law around 7-8 Ankara universities.

The programs were conducted in 8 weeks of 2 hour sessions.

10 graduate students were accepted out of the 16 applications to each. Students were distributed a reading list piled in a volume. 

One of the Graduate Student Seminar programs was on “David Hume’s Political and Moral Philosophy” supervised by Asst. Prof. Dr. Melih Yurusen who has a PhD in philosophy on Hume (first in Turkish which is comprehensive and written from a classical liberal perspective) and a senior fellow at ALT. This program was conducted via the grant delivered by Network for a Free Society. 

The other program covered by GPT grant was titled “Hayekian Approach to Social Sciences: Complexity and the Knowledge Problem” and moderated by Assoc. Prof. Dr. Fuat Oguz dealing with the problems of regulation and deepening his interests in Hayekian understanding. 

Both programs were carried out with similar conditions.

In the announcements, it was mentioned that this program will offer understanding of the distinctive peculiarity in Hume’s philosophy which heavily influenced theories of knowledge, ethics and science in a historical context. Among the rich content of the program participants would find Scottish enlightenment, knowledge theory, passions, virtue, justice, rationalism, functions of commerce, and relations between liberty, authority and security.   The other program offered further understanding of the social world as a whole, beyond social engineering, instead with the ideas of Hayek and Austrian School via the discussions on the complexity theories and the knowledge problem. Moreover the seminars aimed to contribute to the participant’s economic and social perspectives based on competition and rule of law.     

Please see the titles of the reading list here.

The reading list covered mostly pieces from Melih Yurusen’s PhD thesis prepared mainly from the Online Library of Liberty of Liberty Fund, some Turkish translations, and prints made by Liberte Publications of ALT. 

This seminar was scheduled for every Saturday between 11.00 am – 13.00 pm starting from March 23 ending on May 18. Please see the picture from the very first session below.