About Me

Ducunt volentem Fata; trahunt nolentem.

I was born in 1961 in a village in Shropshire , grew up in Shrewsbury, and went to Leeds University to study Music and English, staying on to play in a band and sign on the dole. After some time I realised that I wasn't going to be a star and decided to get into TEFL (Teaching English as a Foreign Language), which is how I ended up here in Turkey. The reason I'm still here (apart from the fascinating language, great food and amazing music) is that I'm married to a Turkish ceramics teacher called Nalan.

Getting on to one of the topics of this website, I got into linguistics as a kind of spin-off from TEFL, plus an early admiration of Noam Chomsky (admittedly his politics more than his linguistics) and a fascination with the way language affects thought, which I probably picked up from people as diverse as William Burroughs and Benjamin Lee Whorf.

As a result of all this, I took an MA in linguistics at Surrey University's English Language Institute, and am currently working at Bilkent University ,teaching English and academic skills to Political Science and International Relations students. This means that I get to talk to a bunch of bright, pleasant young people about Plato and actually get paid for it.

As for the philosophical side of things, I've been through a bewildering variety of belief systems, to the extent that I now have a bad case of philosophical multiple personalities. These days I suppose I could be described as a "stoicurean" i.e. I'm a Stoic or an Epicurean according to what mood I'm in at the time.

Projects

Philosophical ...

I'm currently working on a trilogy of papers on the philosophy of desire, which continue the ideas I first put forward in things like How to get an "ought" from an "is" (a shameless misinterpretation of Hume!) and Yet more thoughts on "the Good". I hope eventually to publish them in real-world (i.e. dead tree) format, so they probably won't be appearing here, but there are occasional web spin-offs of this project, such as Adam and Eve: a thought experiment and The Diffidence Principle.

Linguistic...

Although I make my living through teaching English and academic skills, I'm also interested in cognitive linguistics, particularly categorisation theory. A while ago I wrote a paper combining protype and feature-based categorisation to analyse Turkish terms for women, which may eventually be published in a collection of cognitive and cultural linguistics stuff.
I'm also interested in constructed languages, particularly Lojban, not only because of it's potential as a culturally-neutral international language, but also as a kind of mental experiment to see how my thinking changes in a different language. I guess you could call me a Neo-Whorfian ;-)

Other...

I've been involved with martial arts on and off since 1979. The main style I practice is t'ai chi, though I have a little experience of aikido, hapkido and wing chun, and am currently trying to learn capoeira.

I also spend an inordinate time playing with computers. I'm not much of a programmer, though I've written a few Perl scripts, such as perlconc, a simple online concordancing program for corpus linguistics.