Ekin Erkan is a Turkish philosopher specializing in the philosophy of mind, perception, science, language, and technology, living in New York City. Erkan's work is currently situated on the connection between Kant's transcendental unity of apperception/original synthetic unity of apperception and the 'association of ideas' per Kant's general and formal logic, parsing how Kant's Critique of Pure Reason proffers a novel program for the philosophy of mind—particularly insofar as the binding of percepts is concerned. Insofar as the study of Kant and the philosophy of mind is concerned, Erkan is interest in expressivist approaches to the first person "I think", and parsing between the apperceptive "I think"/transcendental "I think" and empirical "I think", while exploring the conditions for higher-order thought vis-a-vis empirical content. Erkan thus draws from Béatrice Longuenesse, Katharina Kraus, Tim Henning, Tobias Rosefeldt, Anja Jauernig, and other working on the transcendental unity of apperception. Erkan is currently working on a research project that demonstrates how Kant theorized a nascent version of the higher-order thought (HOT) later formalized by David Rosenthal. Insofar as the philosophy of mind is concerned, Erkan is, broadly speaking, interested in indirect realism and phenomenal overflow, thus bridging Ned Block's work with that of Kant. Erkan also works in empirical philosophy, particularly the philosophy of memory and perception, with a focus on olfaction and olfactory processing (following the work of those like Stuart Firestein and Ann-Sophie Barwich). Erkan has also recently been working on Hegel's 'das Logische', drawing from Angelica Nuzzo, Elena Ficara, and Karen Ng to work through the presuppositionless opening through the Actuality chapter, thus prodding different renderings of Hegel's logic (including non-classical logics, modal logic, and formal logic) in the service of modal metaphysics. Erkan is also inspired, albeit somewhat critical of, Brandomian incompatibility semantics and inferentialism as a Fregelian program that helps bring light to that which formal logic evades (normativity), yet Erkan also hopes to supplement Brandom, whom Erkan charges (alongside Houlgate, Nuzzo, Di Giovanni, and other textualist readers of Hegel) as eluding the a priori categories of thinking and being inherent to the Logic. Recently, Erkan has been researching Catarina Dutilh Novaes' work on de-semantification and its compatibility, or incompatability, with theories of extended mind (although Erkan is widely critical of vehicle externalism). Erkan considers themselves to be a Sellarsian and considers Wilfrid Sellars to be one of the most important historical influences on his work on Kant (albeit Erkan has published articles that problematize Sellars' flattening Kant's conception of imagination with the understanding in Sellars' review of the Schematism section of the Transcendental Analytic). Although Erkan deeply admires the work of Brandom and McDowell, Erkan's heart is with the so-called "right-wing Sellarsians" Johanna Seibt, Jay Rosenberg, and David Rosenthal (albeit Erkan considers the label "right-wing Sellarsian" odd, as there is little "right-wing" about staking science as the measure of all things). Insofar as the philosophy of cognitive science and neuroscience is concerned, Erkan is inspired by the Right-Sellarsian naturalist project, and takes the Churchlands' program of neurophilosophy seriously. Having been raised by two physicians, one of whom was a neurosurgeon and neuroscientist, Erkan's writing on the philosophy of perception and philosophy of mind/cognitive science keeps empirical philosophy, particularly neuroscience and perceptual psychology, close at hand. Erkan hopes to continue their work on empirical philosophy by further engaging the philosophical study of olfaction, prodding the philosophy of perception away from visuo-centric models.
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