Onur Özmen is a philosopher researching moral philosophy and realism. He completed his PhD on the philosophy of critical realism and ethics at the Institute of Education, University College London in 2022, where he explored the relations between dialectical thought, metatheories of and for science, and ethics. He has been an Associate Editor of the Journal of Critical Realism since 2023. He holds an MA degree in Philosophy and Social Thought from Istanbul Bilgi University and an BSc degree in Civil Engineering from Istanbul Technical University.

Onur is involved in various projects developing critical realism in multiple directions, including editing a book on Roy Bhaskar’s philosophy, writing a monograph on a critical theory of ethics, and running a reading group on critical realist theory. His latest research was on eudaimonistic ethics and educational practice, and he is currently working on theories of the self. Apart from his areas of specialization on critical realism and ancient Greek moral philosophy, he is interested in climate change, philosophy of education, and social theory. 

The Ethics of Climate Change in Compulsory Education in Germany and Turkey: A Critical and Comparative Analysis

This interdisciplinary research brings together the ethics of climate change and education to examine what kind of ethics we need in order to deal with climate change, whether this need is met by the curricula and textbooks in compulsory education in Germany and Turkey—two countries that are placed at the uppermost and lowest categories, respectively, in climate change and environmental performance rankings—and how these curricula can be improved. It will explore the moral dispositions that contemporary societies need to cultivate among their citizens in order to deal with global climate change while offering a metaethics to be able to coherently frame the problem under these terms and critically and comparatively analyze the extent to which compulsory education systems in Germany and Turkey are conducive to such cultivation. In light of the findings, suggestions will be made on relevant modifications in educational policies to adapt curricula to better meet this challenge. The project will utilize critical realism and dialectical critical discourse analysis as the overarching conceptual framework and method, respectively.