Doctor, philosopher and politician.(B. 1877, Kayseri
– D. 1949, Istanbul) He graduated from ÜsküdarPaşakapısıRüştiyesi(Secondary
School) and Askeriİdadi(Military High School) and he had also attended to the Faculty
of Medicine for a while. While he was a student in Faculty of Medicine, he
joined the İttihatçılar(T.N. Unionists from the Committee of Union and
Progress) and fled to Europe in 1896. He graduated from the Faculty of Medicine
in University of Geneva (1902) and he was promoted to associate professor
there. In 1908, he became the professor-in-ordinary in the department of pharmacodynamics
in the Istanbul Faculty of Medicine upon the invitation of BesimÖmer and CemilTopuz.
He maintained his duty there until he was retired in 1944 and elected as a
member of parliament. He died while he was still a parliamentarian.
AkilMuhtar
was known as internal diseases specialist. He also did researches on the history
of medicine and was interested in painting. His major feature giving him an
important place in Turkish Ideology was his interest in philosophy. He
presented interesting ideas in the discussions he attended in Conferences of Maarif
and Ahlâk (T.N. Education and Morals). He wrote a book, İlimBilimindenAhlâk,
(1942, 3rd Edition in 1950) in that field. In this book, he
described morals as rules of life and then he said that those rules would serve
us to have a salutary and happy life and to be enlightened gradually. After
that superficial definition, he reviewed his notion about morals with the help
of Th. Werner’s and Höffing’s works. Yet, he left some of his ideas uncompleted
because of his impetuosity. As for him, this work was pre-study for
philosophical morals. In theory of moral development, the notion he was
interested in most was Darwin’s. Thus, he tried to complete his notion of moral
development based on biology in his book.