Babanzâde Ahmed Naim's contributions to late Ottoman thought

Babanzâde Ahmed Naim is one of the most preeminent scholars who lived during the last years of the Ottoman Empire and the first years of the Republic of Turkey. Babanzâde, a thinker who worked as a translator, writer, government officer, Arabic teacher, also was a professor of philosophy at Darülfünun. Throughout his time as a professor, he gave lectures on metaphysics, logic, morality, aphorism, psychology, and philosophy, and he translated many articles and books on these subjects by French thinkers such as G. Fonsegrive, Paul Janet, Émile Picard, Élie Rabier. He also was a member of Istılahat-ı İlmiyye Encümeni, and Telif ve Tercüme and played an important role in these chambers' activities. Bâbanzade, who expressed his views in his translations and publications on the fact that modern Turkish lacked philosophical terms, criticized views emerging from several movements such as materialism, positivism, rationalism. The aim of this study is to introduce Babanzâde, to reveal his studies about philosophy terminology and to evaluate his philosophical criticism. The study consists of five sections; an introduction, three main chapters, and a conclusion. The first chapter informs the reader about Babanzâde's life and his work. In the second chapter, how Babanzâde deals with philosophy, as opposed to the understanding of positivism, is shown. In contrast to what positivism has to say, Babanzâde thinks that philosophy has its own subjects and has a very important place among disciplines. For this reason, he wants to determine and consolidate the place of philosophy among various disciplines by classifying disciplines in a detailed manner. In the third chapter, the contributions of Babanzâde in the formation and establishment of the terms of philosophy in Modern Turkish are revealed. According to the thinker, the most important reason why philosophy did not take foot in the Ottoman Empire in the 19th and 20th centuries and philosophical publications fell short is the fact that philosophical terminology was not consolidated. Babanzâde, who has served in various committees established for the solution of this problem, also produced some other work on his own. He found Turkish equivalents to near two thousand philosophy/psychology terms in his translation of Mebâdî-i Felsefeden İlmü'n-Nefs from G. Fonsegrive. In the fourth chapter, Babanzâde's criticism of Kant's understanding of morality and materialistic understanding of science is given. In the conclusion section, Babanzâde's philosophical views are evaluated and their contributions are presented in their most important aspects. In doing this research, footnotes that Babanzâde wrote down in his translations and his publications in Turkish were especially analyzed elaborately.