Abstract

The aim of this article is to analyze the reception of German philosophy at Istanbul University in the context of the academic relations between Germany and Turkey. These complex relations should not just be restricted to the presence of exiled German scholars in 1930s Istanbul. They must be reassessed in light of a broader political transfer of knowledge. The 1920s German philosophy paradigms that stood against the neo-Kantian tradition were used in Turkey in order to lay the foundations of a national and secularized academic philosophy. With the nomination of several associate professors trained in Germany in the 1930s, Nicolai Hartmann’s “new ontology” as well as philosophical anthropology became the most discussed philosophical paradigms at Istanbul University. They were perceived as a substitute for certain conceptions of philosophy which were deemed traditional, as well as an alternative to the paradigms endorsed in 1930s Istanbul by exiled philosophers, such as logical empiricism. This influence of Hartmann’s ontology and anthropologic theories continued to grow after the Second World War until the 1960s, with the arrival of German professors who contributed to the training of the next generation of Turkish associate professors. What role did that largely institutionalized reception of German philosophy play in the linguistic and theoretical reorganization of Turkish academic philosophy? How were those different paradigms used in the discourse on modernity and how did they come to replace the devaluated traditional conceptions of philosophy?