Akil Muhtar Özden

Intellectual, Doctor of Medicine, Politician

Education
Faculty of Medicine in University of Geneva

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.

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