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Serife Tekin, Ph.D.

Associate Professor, Faculty Fellow - Interdisciplinary Engagement, Philosophy and Classics

Serife Tekin

Bio

Şerife Tekin was born in Turkey and she spent her childhood and adolescence on the Aegean coast hanging around the ruins of Ancient Greek Civilization. She likes to think that she is a philosopher because she stepped foot on the soils that the Greek gods, goddesses, and philosophers left their marks, inhaled the salty humid sea air they breathed in, and inhabited a sense of wonder that woke them up from the deepest sleeps everyday. She received her PhD in 2010 at York University in Toronto, with the dissertation, “Mad Narratives: Exploring Self-Constitutions Through the Diagnostic Looking Glass," following which she was a postdoctoral research fellow in Feminist Bioethics and Neuroethics at Dalhousie University, in Halifax, Canada. After Dalhouise, she completed another postdoctoral fellowship at the Center for the Philosophy of Science at the University of Pittsburgh. Prior to coming to UTSA, she was an assistant professor and the Director of Medical Humanities Minor at Daemen College, in Amherst, NY. Her research in Philosophy of Psychiatry is at the cusp of feminist approaches to Philosophy of Science, Philosophy of Mind, and Ethics. In her work, she aims to expand psychiatric knowledge by supplementing existing scientific literature with a philosophical study of the first-person accounts of those with mental illness — a rich but rarely used resource. She uses philosophical tools to engage with the scientific and clinical literature on mental illness, philosophical literature on the self, and the ethical literature on what contributes to human flourishing and expand psychiatric knowledge that will ultimately lead to effective treatments of mental illness. It matters to her that her knowledge and skills have impact on real lives, whether in the classroom when she is teaching, or outside the classroom when she is mentoring. When she is not teaching or writing, she likes to run, ride her bike, cook, and see art.

Teaching

  • 2013-2018 PHI 102 Medicine, Culture, and the Self: Introduction to Medical Humanities
  • 2013-2018 PHI 329 Magic and Science: Principles of Scientific Reasoning
  • 2013-2018 PHI 321 Medical Ethics
  • 2013-2018 PHI 247 Philosophical Issues in Psychiatry
  • 2013-2018 PHI 110 Philosophical Thinking
  • 2013-2014 PHI 457 Religious and Scientific Views of the World
  • 2013-2014 PHI 232 Ambiguity of Human Experience

Research Interests

  • Philosophy of Science
  • Philosophy of Medicine (esp. Psychiatry)
  • Philosophy of Mind/Psychology
  • Bioethics

Degrees

  • Ph.D. in Philosophy, York University (2010).
  • M.A. in Philosophy, University of Saskatchewan (2010).
  • B.Sc. in Economics with minor in Philosophy, Middle East Technical University (2002).

Honors and Awards

  • Lutcher Brown Distinguished Professor

Presentations

Publications