I elucidate Heidegger’s understanding of the “place-being” of the “question of being.” My premises are: 1) Heidegger’s “question of being” can be appropriately made sense of as the “question of language.” 2) The “question of language” requires a topological approach that looks into the link between the place-nature of language and the open-bounded essence of human existence. First, I explain the topological underpinnings of Heidegger’s later thought of being as the clearing and language; second, I examine Sheehan’s phenomenological reading of (...) Heidegger by focusing on the relationship between alētheia and appropriation. In the first section, I explain the correlation between place and language within the context of the “question of being” and display how understanding the former is crucial in having a more complete perspective for the latter. In the second section, I examine Sheehan’s acknowledgment of Heidegger’s idea of place in his understanding of the nature of human existence in relation to Ereignis, while criticizing the “metaphorical” reading of the “placebeing” of the clearing. (shrink)

I argue that Millianism has the very odd consequence that there are simple direct questions that Millians can grasp, but they cannot answer them in the positive or the negative, or in some other way, nor could they say that they do not know the answer.

Çağdaş Kıta Felsefesinin en önemli figürlerinden olan Martin Heidegger, Felsefe literatürüne kazandırdığı onlarca özgün kavramın yanında yerleşik kavramlar üzerinde de oldukça tartışmalı yaklaşımlar sergiler. Logos kavramı da bu tartışmalı kavramlardan biri olarak açığa çıkar. Bu kavram sistematik felsefe geleneği içerisinde hep akılla ilişkilendirilirken Heidegger ile birlikte Sokrates öncesi köklerine geri döndürülerek söylem alanına yeniden dahil edilir. Bu andan itibaren felsefe tarihi içerisinde söze dair olan ile hakikat arasında bir köprü ortaya çıkar. Bu köprünün önemli bir ayağını geleneksel anlamda felsefe oluştururken (...) bir diğerini ilgi çekici bir şekilde sanat oluşturur. Heidegger’in bu incelikli çabasına dair olan bu çalışma, temel anlamda söze dair olduğuna inandığı sanat anlayışı ve bu anlayışın en değerli parçası olarak gördüğü şiir sanatı üzerine yoğunlaşarak Çağdaş Kıta Felsefesini kökten dönüşüme uğratan bu filozofun hakikat ile sanat ilişkisini irdeleme amacını taşımaktadır. (shrink)

This essay argues that Islam, understood as a historically produced body of knowledge, contains resources from which we can reconstruct a conception of human dignity understood as a human right. This reconstruction requires a critical reinterpretation of some of these resources. Pursued with historical sensitivity and a comparative lens, this interpretative activity can bring about considerable benefits. It can help us overcome the religious/secular and Islam/West binaries which have limited the human rights debate. It can help us envision a human (...) rights agenda that is universal and yet appreciative of cultural difference. (shrink)

Ultimately all change in the social world depends on self-expansion leading to self-transcendence, that is, depends upon, even if it does not entirely consist in, radical negation, which is pivotal...

This essay attempts to elaborate a political theory of capital’s violence. Recent analyses have adopted Karl Marx’s notion of the “primitive accumulation of capital” for investigating the forcible methods by which the conditions of capital accumulation are reproduced in the present. I argue that the current scholarship is limited by a certain functionalism in its theorization of ongoing primitive accumulation. The analytic function accorded to primitive accumulation, I contend, can be better performed by the concepts of “capital-positing violence” and “capital-preserving (...) violence.” In coining these new concepts, I first refine the conceptual core of primitive accumulation as the coercive capitalization of social relations of reproduction, which falls into sharpest relief in the violent history of colonial capitalism. I then elucidate this conceptual core with reference to Carl Schmitt’s account of European colonial expansion and Walter Benjamin’s reflections on law-making and law-preserving violence. The resultant concepts of capital-positing and capital-preserving violence, I conclude, can illuminate both the historical and the quotidian operations of the politico-juridical force that has been constitutive of capitalism down to our present moment. (shrink)

European countries; eminent thinkers; Turkish image; Islam image.

Yapay zekâ araştırmaları doğrudan etkilerini gördüğümüz sayısız uygulamayla birlikte tüm hızıyla sürüyor. Ancak bu araştırmaların nihai amacı hayatımızı kolaylaştıran teknolojiler üretmekten ziyade insanın sahip olduğu türden bir zekâyı, genel yapay zekâyı, hatta daha fazlasını elde etmektir. Yapay zekânın sadece bir satranç ustası olmasını, araç kullanmasını veya asistanlık yapmasını değil, anlamlı iletişim kurabilmesini, yaratıcı fikirler ortaya koyabilmesini, sağduyu sahibi olabilmesini, dünya hakkında düşünebilmesini istiyoruz. Böyle bir zekânın olabilirliği üzerine konuşulduğunda felsefi problemler baş gösteriyor. Bunlardan öne çıkanı yapay zekânın insanlar gibi gerçek (...) bir zekâya sahip olup olmadığını nasıl bilebileceğimiz ile ilgili epistemolojik problemdir. Bu noktada zekânın belirtisini sergilenen davranışlarda arayan davranışçı yaklaşım haklı görülebilir ancak bunun bir koşulu vardır: Yapay zekâ bizi kendisinin gerçekten de genel bir zekâya sahip olduğuna ikna etmelidir. Bilincin bu ikna girişiminde bir rol oynuyor olabilmesi yapay zekâ ve bilincin sanılandan daha güçlü bir şekilde birbirine bağlı olduğunu imleyecektir. Daha otonom bir varlık/birey olma hedefinde yapay zekânın yolu bilincin varlığı ile kesişiyor olabilir. (shrink)

In this essay I argue that given Donnellan’s formulation of the attributive uses of definite descriptions, as well as Kripke’s [6] and Salmon’s [10] generalized accounts, most uses of definite descriptions that are taken to be attributive turn out not to be so. In building up to my main thesis, I first consider certain problematic cases of uses of definite descriptions that do not neatly fit into any category. I then argue that, in general, a complete definite description we use (...) is complex, in which there is an embedded singular term that is used referentially. From this I conclude that an attributive use of a definite description is an extremely rare linguistic phenomenon, much less frequent than what Donnellan, Kripke, and Salmon have presupposed; so much so that the standard examples given by Donnellan of the attributive use of definite descriptions do not qualify as attributive. (shrink)

In this paper I respond to and elaborate on some of the ideas put forth on my book The Philosophy of Curiosity (2012) as well as its follow-up “Curiosity and Ignorance” (2016) by Nenad Miščević, Erhan Demircioğlu, Mirela Fuš, Safi ye Yiğit, Danilo Šuster, Irem Günhan Altıparmak, and Aran Arslan.

In “Topology of Balasaguni’s Kutadgu Bilig: Thinking the Between,” Onur Karamercan focuses on the philosophical dimension of Kutadgu Bilig, a poetic work of Yūsuf Balasaguni, an 11th century Central Asian thinker, poet, and statesman. Karamercan pays special attention to the meaning of betweenness and, in the first step of his argument, discusses the hermeneutic and topological implications of the between, distingushing the dynamic sense of betweenness from a static sense of in-betweenness. He then moves on to analyze Balasaguni’s notion (...) of language, which he interprets as an early critique of the instrumental account of language and, by examining several selected fragments from Kutadgu Bilig, illustrates Balasaguni’s designation of language as an inexhaustible phenomenon. In the process, he also points to the possible parallels between Balasaguni’s and Heidegger’s ideas of language. In the final section of the article, building on his argument, Karamercan thematizes the margins of Turkic languages and of Islamic philosophy, suggesting that they need to be reexamined. He problematizes the very meaning of Asia itself by decentering what he calls “its internal East–West antagonism” and puts forth instead a framework based on in-betweenness reinterpreted from a topological perspective, proposing it as an alternative view which might help us make sense of the hermeneutic neighborhoods of Asian philosophies. (shrink)

Vallortigara & Rogers (V&R) assume that the alignment of escape responses in gregarious species is the central evolutionary organizer of a wide range of cerebral asymmetries. Although it is indeed likely that the benefits of a population asymmetry in social species outweigh its costs, it is hard to see (a) why the population should not oscillate between two subgroups with mirror-image asymmetries, (b) why solitary animals should keep their inherited population asymmetry despite a resulting fitness reduction, and (c) and why (...) so many vertebrate species have comparable cerebral asymmetries. (shrink)

Aboitiz and colleagues propose that the tectorotundal pathway of birds and reptiles is homologous not to the mammalian colliculopulvinar system but to the posterior complex/intralaminar nuclei. However, as outlined below, a large amount of strong evidence points to a homology of the tectorotundal and the colliculopulvinar system. This makes it likely that DVR and isocortex might be in part homologous.

Despite the recent increase in interest in philosophy about ignorance, little attention has been paid to the question of what makes it possible for a being to become aware of their own ignorance. In this paper, I try to provide such an account by arguing that, for a being to become aware of their own ignorance, they must have the mental capacity to represent something as being unknown to them. For normal adult humans who have mastered a language, mental representation (...) of an unknown is enabled by forming linguistic expressions whose content is grasped, but whose referent is unknown. I provide a neo-Fregean, a neo-Russellian, and then a unified account of this. On that basis, I then argue further that the content of ignorance can always be captured by a question. I then distinguish between propositional ignorance and non-propositional ignorance and argue that propositional ignorance attributions can be of three types, that-ignorance, whether-ignorance, and fact-ignorance. I conclude by arguing that the acquisition of truths, even when it yields knowledge that is certain, does not always eliminate one’s ignorance and that there is a degree of ignorance in almost everything we claim to know. (shrink)

This article is about the signs during the creative stage of one’s self-development. With the acceptance of the creative act as an existential phenomenon, the research considers the creative process as a genuine expression that has been actualized during one’s search for his/her existence. An artist reflects his/her existential being through his/her work to construct an original self, by facing the world and within the struggle to construct the new self that stands beyond confusion. Tarasti’s philosophical approach to “existential semiotics” (...) will be applied to the existential being of the artist Alev Ebuzziya Siesbye, and her creative act will be analyzed by means of the modalities, the semiotic square of being/doing, and the sign processes evident in the field of art. Siesbye’s existential personality and creative acts have been discussed by looking at what she has done in terms of her attitude on clay; her position in the contemporary art world and her artistic interrogations has been discussed in the existential being of the artist with the existential signs. (shrink)

This article investigates the early modern history of dog labor in small-scale industrial production in Europe and the Americas as a paradigmatic example of the history of animal labor. The turnspit dog was the “product” of material conditions of production as they were forced to labor in butter-churning, knife-grinding, water-raising, sewing, and food industries. Furthermore, their bodies and labor tried to be “perfected” by selective breeding and violent methods of training, mechanical dressage, and labor discipline. The incorporation of dog labor (...) into mechanized industrial production developed hand-in-hand with certain ideas, ideologies, and mentalities, such as the mechanistic interpretation of bodies deprived of soul, mind, and sentience. (shrink)

Onur Karamercan, Heidegger'de Sanat Eserinin Yeri: Sanal Müzeler Çağında Sanat ve Mekân adlı yazısında, iki yıldır yaşamakta olduğumuz salgınla birlikte çok daha sık biçimde görülmeye başlayan “sanal müze” veya “elektronik müze” uygulamalarına yakından bakar. Dünyanın en meşhur müzelerinin ve sanat galerilerinin sanatsal ve kültürel etkinliklerden mahrum kalmak istemeyen ziyaretçilerine "kapılarını" elektronik ortamda açtığı ve birçok müzenin de koleksiyonlarını tamamen ya da kısmen dijitalleştirdiği bu ortamda, şu iki soruyu yanıtlamayı amaçlar: 1) Bir mekân olarak bir müzeyi uzaktan ziyaret etmek ve (...) bir müzede sergilenen sanat eserlerini internet üzerinden “deneyimlemek” ne anlama gelmektedir ve 2) bu estetik-dijital “deneyim” (Erlebnis) insanın sanat ve mekân ile olan ilişkisi ve sanat eserinin “tecrübesine” (Erfahrung) dair ne söylemektedir? (shrink)