Rıza Tevfik was born in 1869 in Mustafapaşa, today Svilengrad in Bulgaria, to an Albanian father [3] and Circassian mother,[4][5][6] who died when he was young.

He was one of the four signatories of the stillborn Treaty of Sèvres, being included in the delegation to the Paris Peace Conference by the grand vizier Damat Ferid Pasha, although he occupied no official position at the time of the negotiations, simply being a professor in Istanbul University.

Rıza Tevfik lived in the United States, Cyprus, Hejaz, Jordan (where he was made the director of the National Museum and Library in 1925), and Lebanon during the following 20 years, until he could return to Turkey in the frame of a 1943 amnesty.

Bölükbaşı, who also worked on the promotion of Turkish Folk Literature, published his translations of Ömer Hayyam, his review of Tevfik Fikret and the lecture notes of the philosophy courses he gave at Darülfünun as a book under the title Felsefe Dersleri (Felsefe Dersleri), which has an important place in Turkish intellectual life from a philosophical perspective.

In this work, Rıza Tevfik demonstrated his mastery of the fundamental disciplines of philosophy, ontology and epistemology, and showed that he was a thinker worthy of the title of "philosopher".