Baha Tevfik

Baha Tevfik lived from 1884 to 1914 and was a Turkish philosopher, writer and individualist anarchist born in Izmir in the late Ottoman Empire. He founded Felsefe Dergisi, the first Turkish philosophy journal, in 1913, and worked to introduce Ottoman readers to Western thinkers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Buchner and Ernst Haeckel through his own translations and writings. His own philosophical outlook was a materialist positivism that rejected metaphysics, and he developed theories holding selfishness to be central to human motivation. He died at the age of thirty from appendicitis.