Ismail Kurun is a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at Vanderbilt University. He works in social & political philosophy, Islamic & medieval philosophy, the philosophy of AI, and ethics. He is writing a dissertation on the epistemology of liberalism and the liberalization of nonliberal societies. For more, please visit www.ismailkurun.com.

Link to your website: www.ismailkurun.com

What excites you about philosophy?

Philosophy asks what I take to be the most important questions humans can pursue: What should I do? What is the good life? What can I know? What is the good society? And so on. This is exciting enough. But additionally, when you pursue these questions with an open mind, you don’t know what your life will look like in five years. This turns life into an adventure.

What do you like to do outside work?

I like meeting with friends, working out, hiking, reading classical literature and popular science (just finished Voltaire’s Candide), watching movies, and traveling. I also love reading about tech and finance. These are the main ones, though they keep changing. I used to travel a lot more and tried to see every corner of the cities I visited. Now I spend more time reading, chatting, and watching movies. I rate the movies I watch on IMDb. The list includes more than 350 movies and is available here.

What are you working on right now? 

I’m working on a few papers. Let me tell you about one of them, which is also the last chapter of my dissertation.

This paper develops a model that shows how nonliberal (particularly Muslim-majority) societies can liberalize from their own internal intellectual dynamics. To that end, the paper introduces “philosophical liberalization,” a novel form of liberalization distinct from political and economic liberalization. These latter two forms focus on political and economic institutions. Philosophical liberalization, by contrast, focuses on belief systems.

According to the model, philosophical liberalization takes place through the transformation of unreasonable belief systems (comprehensive doctrines) into reasonable ones. Drawing on public reason liberalism, I articulate two criteria for a belief system to be considered reasonable. First, it should endorse cooperation on fair terms with the adherents of other belief systems. Second, it should accept reasonable pluralism. I define reasonable pluralism as the pluralism of reasonable belief systems. The existence of multiple reasonable belief systems means that it is not that only one belief system makes sense and all others are confused, wrong, vicious, or even dangerous, but multiple belief systems make sense in various degrees, perhaps for certain individuals or for certain contexts.

All this might sound a bit vague here, but they are properly detailed in the paper. The model shows that liberalism is essentially a political theory of reasonableness—that is, it offers a social contract to the reasonable folks of all stripes (reasonable nationalists, reasonable conservatives, reasonable socialists, etc.). It proposes a realistic and workable program of liberalization for nonliberal (particularly Muslim-majority) societies. It shows that epistemic communities in a nonliberal society do not need to abandon their cherished belief systems for that society to build a liberal polity. Rather, if the prevalent belief systems converge upon fair cooperation and reasonable pluralism, the society can build a liberal regime without adopting any classical or comprehensive form of liberalism.

More about this paper and my dissertation is available here.

Name a trait, skill or characteristic that you have that others may not know about.

I can read in 6 languages and have a brown belt in Aikido.

Where is your favorite place you have ever traveled and why?

My favorite places to visit have always been those that most decenter my sense of self by immersing me in unfamiliar forms of life.

One such place was the Convent of L’Incontro, a Franciscan monastery on the hills of Florence, Italy, where I stayed for two weeks. It was exhilarating to witness how Franciscan friars lived. Another was the salon gatherings (diwaniya) that I attended at nights in Kuwait, where I discussed local politics and sipped bitter coffee with members of Bedouin tribes. Yet another was a Jewish service in a synagogue in Nashville where people prayed to “Adonai.” Still another was the Ratha Yatra Hindu chariot festival at the Sri Ganesha Temple in Nashville, where people carried the deity Jagannath during a procession while chanting the Hare Krishna mantra.

I love such experiences and places and hope to seek more of them in the future. Particularly, I’d love to live a few weeks among local tribes in Africa or South America. In a sense, I like amateur anthropology.

Apart from decentering the self, I think these kinds of experiences help us cultivate a deep appreciation of other forms of life in a world where we’re tragically stuck with only one. Ultimately they are deeply humanistic. I guess this is also why I like movies, especially those that immerse you in unfamiliar forms of life. I’ve been rating such movies under a separate list titled “Humanist cinema,” which is available here.

If you could wake up tomorrow with a new talent, what would you most like it to be?

Not sure if it’s a talent, but I did some stand-up at high school and wish I had continued that. I gave it up due to my growing focus on my studies, only to rediscover the value of humor through philosophy! I use humor in the classes I teach, and see that students love it.

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