The Difficulty of Naming
At first glance, the expression “Turkish philosophy” appears to refer to the history of philosophers and philosophical works belonging to a particular society. Yet when the concept is examined more closely, one encounters a complex field in which different criteria such as language, geography, culture, religion, political structure, and institutional affiliation intersect. Is Turkish origin alone sufficient to include a thinker within the history of Turkish philosophy? Must that thinker have written in Turkish? Is having lived in Anatolia or Central Asia decisive? Or should the determining criterion be whether the thinker left a lasting conceptual influence upon the Turkish intellectual world?
These questions cannot be answered through a single criterion. The history of Turkish philosophy and thought is not a closed tradition in which an immutable identity repeats itself across centuries. It is a multilayered history formed through encounters among different languages, beliefs, forms of state, educational institutions, and intellectual movements. For this reason, it is insufficient either to construct the field solely through ethnic origin or to reduce it entirely to modern academic philosophy.
The history of Turkish philosophy and thought considers together the transformation of Turkish into a language of thought, philosophical debates that developed in the geographies inhabited by Turks, relations established with Islamic thought, the Ottoman world of learning, the conceptual ruptures of the modernisation period, and the institutional establishment of philosophy as an academic discipline in the Republican era.
The Distinction Between Turkish Philosophy and the History of Turkish Thought
The history of philosophy and the history of thought are not the same thing. The history of philosophy investigates how fundamental problems such as being, knowledge, value, ethics, logic, the human being, society, and politics have been treated conceptually. The history of thought is broader. Alongside philosophy, it also includes religious interpretations, political ideas, theories of culture, debates over language, sociological analyses, and conceptions of civilisation.
When this distinction is not preserved, every poet, historian, sociologist, or cultural critic can easily be called a “philosopher.” Yet Yusuf Has Hacip and Kaşgarlı Mahmud, İoanna Kuçuradi and Şerif Mardin, Teoman Duralı and Cemil Meriç do not occupy the same place within intellectual history.
İoanna Kuçuradi is a philosopher who has produced systematic work on value philosophy, ethics, and human rights. Şerif Mardin is a sociologist and historian of thought. Cemil Meriç is a cultural critic and thinker. Kaşgarlı Mahmud is a scholar of language who recorded the vocabulary, geography, and cultural world of Turkish. All of these figures belong to the history of Turkish thought, but giving all of them the same title erases the differences among their methods and fields.
The title “History of Turkish Philosophy and Thought” is therefore a more inclusive and more careful designation. It does not dissolve philosophy into intellectual history, nor does it restrict intellectual history only to academic philosophers.
Criteria of Belonging: Language, Geography, Institution, and Influence
Several criteria must be considered together when determining the place of a thinker within this history.
The first criterion is language. Turkish is not merely an instrument through which thoughts are transmitted; it is a field in which concepts are constructed, distinctions of meaning are produced, and a particular conception of the world takes shape. From this perspective, Kutadgu Bilig and Dîvânü Lugāti’t-Türk are not merely historical or literary works. The former treats justice, reason, the state, happiness, and government within a Turkish political and ethical order; the latter produces a map of culture and meaning together with the vocabulary of Turkish.
The second criterion is geography. Central Asia, Khorasan, Iran, Anatolia, the Balkans, and Ottoman cities are not disconnected regions. Thinkers, texts, educational institutions, and translation activities circulated across this broad area. Nevertheless, geographical proximity alone does not create national belonging. To call every thinker who lived in a particular region directly a “Turkish philosopher” would oversimplify historical reality.
The third criterion is institution. Madrasas, Sufi lodges, court circles, translation offices, printing presses, journals, and universities determine the conditions under which thought is produced. In one period, philosophical thought may develop within traditions of commentary and gloss; in another, it may circulate through newspapers, journals, university chairs, or independent publishing.
The fourth criterion is influence. A thinker may not have written in Turkish or lived within a modern Turkish identity, yet their works may have shaped Ottoman and Turkish thought for centuries. Such figures should not necessarily be classified directly as Turkish philosophers, but should be studied among the sources and fields of interaction of Turkish thought.
The First Turkish Texts of Thought
The beginnings of Turkish intellectual history cannot be explained solely through the great systems of Islamic philosophy. Early texts such as the Orkhon Inscriptions already contain a developed language of thought concerning state, power, time, order, people, loyalty, and political responsibility. These are not works of systematic philosophy, yet they reveal the concepts through which social and political existence was understood.
Yusuf Has Hacip’s Kutadgu Bilig is one of the foundational texts of Turkish intellectual history. The work approaches government not merely as the exercise of power, but through the relationship among justice, knowledge, reason, and moderation. Concepts such as kut, sovereignty, happiness, reason, and contentment are transformed into different elements of political order through personified figures.
Kaşgarlı Mahmud’s Dîvânü Lugāti’t-Türk, meanwhile, goes beyond being a dictionary and records the relation between language and world. Words, proverbs, fragments of poetry, place names, and information concerning communities reveal which fields of experience Turkish names and how it names them. The linguistic ground of intellectual history becomes visible here: the history of concepts cannot be separated from the history of words.
The Plural Structure of Turkish-Islamic Thought
With the participation of Turks in the Islamic world, traditions of kalām, Sufism, jurisprudence, logic, ethics, and metaphysics formed a new intellectual context. Yet it is insufficient to explain this field through a general expression such as a “Turkish-Islamic synthesis.”
Māturīdī’s approach to reason, faith, will, and human responsibility; Ahmed Yesevî’s Turkish language of Sufism; Rumi’s understanding of the human being, love, and transformation; Yunus Emre’s poetic thought on being, selfhood, and unity; and Ṣadr al-Dīn al-Qūnawī’s metaphysical system represent different fields of problems.
Some of these figures are systematic philosophers, while others are theologians, Sufis, or poets. A history that does not preserve these distinctions gathers all forms of thought beneath an undefined concept of “wisdom.” Yet the relation between reason and revelation in theology, the understanding of experience and transformation in Sufism, the investigation of being in metaphysics, and the organisation of action in ethics all possess different methods.
Is Ottoman Thought Merely Repetition?
Ottoman thought was for a long time evaluated as a tradition of commentary that produced no original concepts and merely repeated earlier texts. Such an approach overlooks the intellectual function of commentary, gloss, and translation activities.
To comment on a text is not merely to explain it. The commentator reconstructs relationships among concepts, compares different interpretations, records objections, and carries the text into a new educational environment. Figures such as Molla Fenârî, Kınalızâde Ali Çelebi, Taşköprülüzâde, Kâtip Çelebi, and Gelenbevî do not all work within the same intellectual field; they address different subjects including logic, ethics, the classification of sciences, bibliography, and metaphysics.
Ottoman intellectual history is not limited to the madrasa either. Sufi lodges, the court, bureaucracy, law, medicine, astronomy, historiography, and literary circles produced different forms of knowledge. The period should therefore not be reduced to a single question such as “Was there originality?” but studied through the institutions within which concepts were processed.
Modernisation and Conceptual Rupture
In the late Ottoman period, philosophical and political language underwent an important transformation. Concepts such as freedom, nation, homeland, civilisation, progress, people, public opinion, individual, and society began to be used with new meanings. Translations from Western languages, newspapers, journals, new educational institutions, and political struggles changed the forms through which thought circulated.
Namık Kemal, Beşir Fuad, Baha Tevfik, Abdullah Cevdet, Filibeli Ahmed Hilmi, Rıza Tevfik, Ziya Gökalp, Prince Sabahaddin, and Yusuf Akçura do not represent the same intellectual line. There are significant differences among them in relation to positivism, materialism, spiritualism, nationalism, liberalism, and sociology.
The fundamental problem of the period is not merely whether to “adopt or reject the West.” The more important issue is how new concepts of science, politics, and society are to be received within existing languages and institutions. Modernisation therefore ceases to be a simple transfer of ideas from outside and becomes a process of translating, transforming, and applying concepts to local problems.
The Establishment of Academic Philosophy in the Republic
During the Republican period, philosophy acquired a more distinct institutional structure through university departments, textbooks, dictionaries, translations, journals, and academic specialisations. Hilmi Ziya Ülken, Macit Gökberk, Takiyettin Mengüşoğlu, Nusret Hızır, Bedia Akarsu, Nermi Uygur, İsmail Tunalı, İoanna Kuçuradi, Teo Grünberg, and later generations contributed to the establishment of different philosophical fields in Turkish.
It would be incomplete to understand this period merely as the transfer of Western philosophy into Turkey. Translation and teaching were important, but philosophers also produced their own studies on problems of the human being, value, history, language, science, logic, art, and knowledge.
İoanna Kuçuradi’s work on value and evaluation, Takiyettin Mengüşoğlu’s philosophical anthropology, Nermi Uygur’s thought on language and culture, Teo Grünberg’s studies in logic and philosophy of science, and Doğan Özlem’s research on history and hermeneutics are different examples of this plurality.
The Place of Society, Culture, and Critical Thought
The history of Turkish thought is not composed solely of academics working under the title of philosophy within universities. Figures such as Cemil Meriç, Erol Güngör, Şerif Mardin, Taner Timur, Ulus Baker, and Dücane Cündioğlu worked across different disciplines and developed influential lines of thought concerning culture, society, history, modernisation, language, image, and meaning.
When studying these figures, disciplinary distinctions must be preserved. Şerif Mardin’s centre-periphery model is a sociological framework of explanation. Ulus Baker’s analyses of opinion, affect, and image move between sociology and philosophy. Cemil Meriç’s critique of civilisation, umran, and the intellectual is not a systematic philosophical system, but a powerful form of cultural criticism. Dücane Cündioğlu’s works move among language, meaning, interpretation, religion, art, and philosophy.
Oğuz Haşlakoğlu should likewise be considered within a contemporary field of thought developing around art, aesthetics, philosophy, and especially interpretations of Plato. The history of Turkish thought can thus be understood not as a catalogue merely listing figures who lived in the past, but as an ongoing field of conceptual production.
How Should a Thinker Be Read?
Understanding a thinker is not completed by listing their date of birth, education, and the institutions in which they worked. Biographical information should be used only to the extent necessary to explain the intellectual context. The principal question is what problem the thinker addressed and through which concepts that problem was constructed.
Each thinker should therefore be studied in four stages.
First, the thinker’s historical position and fundamental question are identified. Then their works, forms of publication, and fields of study are distinguished. In the third stage, the thinker’s fundamental concepts are explained within their own network of meaning. In the final stage, more detailed studies are developed around particular books, conceptual relationships, influences, and criticisms.
This method makes it possible to evaluate thinkers within their own problems rather than praising them through general statements or reducing them to a single political identity.
Conclusion
The history of Turkish philosophy and thought is not the history of an immutable and homogeneous essence. It is a plural field in which Turkish developed as a language of thought, different philosophical and religious traditions encountered one another, concepts were translated and reinterpreted, and ideas were transformed within new institutions.
Philosophers and sociologists, Sufis and cultural critics, scholars of language and political thinkers can stand side by side within this history, but the differences among them should not be erased. What they share is not membership in the same discipline, but their contribution to the formation, transformation, or criticism of the Turkish intellectual world.
To construct a history of Turkish philosophy and thought does not simply mean listing forgotten names again. The fundamental task is to verify texts, distinguish concepts, correct false affiliations, and reread each thinker within their own question. Such a history does not preserve the past as a closed inheritance; it continues to investigate the possibilities that thought possesses in Turkish.
