Volkan Çelebi
I am a philosopher and researcher working on Genesis Alignment, model character, constitutional alignment, and embodied intelligence at Per Stellar, an independent AI house I founded in Paris. My current work asks how artificial cognition can become more attentive to human thought without confusing increased capability with the embodied genesis through which human beings begin, create, and transform their worlds.
Before this I spent fifteen years as an Editor in Chief, founding Monokl in Istanbul and later Ether Books, and edited around eighty translated books in philosophy, literature, and science. I also created and directed Philosophers in Istanbul, a nine year conference series that brought major figures of contemporary continental philosophy into sustained public conversation in Turkey.
I have a PhD in philosophy from Université Paris 8 with a dissertation on ecstasy and the body from the Sufis to Marx, and an MA in philosophy from Yeditepe University with a thesis on Levinas and meontology. My philosophy work has mostly revolved around phenomenology, embodied subjectivity, Sufi metaphysics, and the relation between thought and life.
I think the poetic quality of a life is its substance rather than its decoration, and I judge work on these systems by the kind of human future it leaves room for. I have a son. That is the horizon I measure against.