Nadja-Mira Yolcu is an academic staff member at the Chair of Theoretical Philosophy and Philosophy of Language. From July 2018 until June 2022 she was a member and doctoral student in the research project “Mind the Meaning: The Philosophy of Psychological Expressivism”. After her undergraduate studies in philosophy (minor: psychology) at the University of Heidelberg, she earned a BPhil in Philosophy (master’s degree) from the University of Oxford in the summer of 2017. During her studies in Heidelberg and Oxford, she received a scholarship from the German Academic Scholarship Foundation. Ms Yolcu’s research interests focus mainly on philosophy of language and epistemology. In her dissertation project, Ms Yolcu aims to give an (expressivist) analysis of utterances of negative self-ascriptions of mental states. The dissertation was submitted in December 2022 and successfully defended in April 2024. Her teaching focuses on philosophy of language and epistemology.
Doctoral project
Expression and Negation: An Expressivist Account of Disavowals
Betreuer: Prof. Dr. Wolfgang Freitag, Lehrstuhl Philosophie I
The dissertation project aims to develop an expressivist analysis of negative avowals. So far, expressivist theories (Wittgenstein 1953; Bar-On 2004, 2015; Finkelstein 2003; Freitag 2014, 2018) have focused on positive avowals. But negative avowals (disavowals), e.g., utterances of “I don’t hope that it is raining,” pose, or seem to pose, a serious problem to avowal expressivism. It is unclear what a speaker expresses with a negative avowal – how can one express the absence of a mental state? The purpose of the dissertation is to examine negative avowals. I will tentatively claim that, despite the mentioned problem, they can receive an expressivist analysis. I propose that disavowals constitute cases of expressive denegation. Thus, we can avoid a descriptivist backlash. An expressivist analysis of disavowals will, furthermore, contribute to a new understanding of various philosophical problems such as Moore’s paradox and suspension of belief.
The dissertation was submitted in December 2022 and successfully defended in April 2024.
Publications
2022: “Vindicating Avowal Expressivism: A Note on Rosenthal's Performance-Conditional Equivalence Thesis”. Phenomenology and Mind, https://journals.openedition.org/phenomenology/1107
2021: “An expressivist solution to Moorean paradoxes”, gemeinsam mit Wolfgang Freitag. Synthese, Januar 2021, https://doi.org/10.1007/s11229-020-03012-4
2019: Edmund Gettier. Is Justified True Belief Knowledge? / Ist gerechtfertigte, wahre Überzeugung Wissen? Herausgabe und Übersetzung gemeinsam mit Marc Andree Weber. Reclam.
2015: „Eine kurze Einleitung in die Freiburger Philosophie”, gemeinsam mit Katharina Kraus. Chinesische Übersetzung in: Huang Yusheng (ed.), Tsinghua Studies in Western Philosophy vol. 1 no. 2, Tsinghua University, China.