CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Genc, Hakan Ahmet |
|---|---|
| Title | The Late Ottoman Quest for a Language of Philosophy and Riza Tevfik's Hermeneutic Response |
| Summary | In the present thesis, I offer an account on the formation of modern philosophical terminology in the Ottoman Empire in the 1910s. With this intention, I explore the working of the Commission on Scientific Terminology. The Commission was established in 1913 by the Ministry of Education to conventionalize Turkish terminology which would adequately convey the meaning of modern concepts. As the investigation of the members’ views and the terminological recommendations of the Commission indicate, the Commission took Arabic as the source language from which the modern Turkish terminology was to be derived. Analyzing the reasons behind the linguistic criteria prevailed in the Commission, I present that the preference of Arabic was based on the contention that Arabic is the classical language for Ottoman, analogous to Greek and Latin for European languages. Since French gradually replaced Arabic as the prestige language of the Ottoman literati over the second half of the nineteenth century, I suggest that late Ottoman intellectuals refashioned Arabic from being the language of actual intellectual production to a historicized language of the origin of the Ottoman intellectual tradition. I present Rıza Tevfik’s elaborations on Arabic’s being the classical language for Turkish. My close analysis of Rıza Tevfik’s Detailed Dictionary of Philosophy aims to show that his genealogical readings of Ancient and Classical Arabic philosophers in the Dictionary were intended to connect the modern Ottoman philosophical terminology to Ancient Greek via Arabic philosophy. |
| Supervisor | Al-Bagdadi, Nadia |
| Department | History MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/genc_hakan.pdf |
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