Philosophy in the Late Ottoman Empire
My research project focuses on the evolution of philosophical concepts during the last decades of the Ottoman Empire. One of the most striking features of this formative period of institutional philosophy within the Turkish context is on the one hand the conjunction of the positivist ideal of progress with 19th century popular German materialism and, on the other, the critique of the latter’s philosophical, anthropological, as well as societal implications. The thereof resulting intellectual discourse was accompanied by social engineering projects of the Ottoman intelligentsia, which posed a new and heterogeneous social class and defended diverging ideals regarding the future intellectual orientation of the empire in the aftermath of the Young Turk Revolution in 1908.
The participants of this discourse drew on concepts of a rich Islamic semantic tradition such as ‘religion’(dīn), ‘philosophy’ (falsafa), and ‘knowledge’ (ʿilm). By doing so, they intervened in an ongoing epistemological transition with far-reaching intellectual, political, as well as societal consequences. The thesis’ main primary sources (programmatic journals, newspapers, pamphlets, short treatises, etc.) will be examined by means of a methodology that combines contextualist approaches of the history of ideas with Begriffsgeschichte.
By looking at this formative period of institutional philosophy in Turkey, my dissertation project forms part of a broader discourse that explores the possibilities and outlines of modern, non-western philosophical traditions and their legitimacy.
