Who Are We?
Boğaziçi Üniversitesi Felsefe Topluluğu (BÜFET) is a student-led initiative aiming to provide a space for people to come together in their shared passion for philosophical discourse and practice. We regard the Philosophy department of Boğaziçi Üniversitesi as our intellectual home and strongly value its long tradition of promoting critical thinking and academic freedom.
Our community intends to be welcoming and inclusive: we invite everybody who is philosophically curious to join us, regardless of academic and personal background. BÜFET is not restricted to a specific school of thought and encourages people to engage in discussions over a wide range of topics.
We believe that the most inspiring philosophical insights can be gained when different people come together: to that end, we hope to build a strong and diverse community committed to principles of mutual care and creative collective thinking.
Our Story
Since December 2022, a group of students from Boğaziçi University have been working to set up a community based on a common interest in philosophy.
On the 6th of February, shortly before we were to publish our mission statement, the devastating news broke of the earthquake which has claimed many thousands of lives in Turkey and Syria and left thousands more homeless and desperate. We therefore had to postpone all of our activities.
One might wonder what good a philosophy community can do in such dark times. Sometimes we wonder that ourselves. However, we choose not to wallow in a sense of helplessness and we refuse to let this disaster break our spirits. We stand with the people affected by the earthquake.
Above all, we want to be there for everybody from the university who lost loved ones and homes. Especially in light of the government’s politicised decision to close dormitories and limit movement on campuses across the country, we want to provide spaces where students and others can come together.
We think that it is more vital than ever to create spaces in which students and non-students alike can gather and socialise and try to make sense of the unfathomable scale of this tragedy.