Osmanlı fazilet eksenli siyaset teorilerine Kınalızade Ali Çelebi'nin katkısı

Despite the increasing numbers of studies in various disciplines (Hursthouse, 1999; MacIntyre, 1981, 2016; Skinner, 1996, 2002; Philp, 2007; Hankins, 2019; Vasalou, 2019), virtue ethics is an understudied branch of normative moral philosophy whose importance for the global history of political thought is not yet given its due credit. This thesis explores the early modern contribution of a sixteenth-century scholar to the articulation of a virtue political discourse that occupied a central space in the history of Ottoman political thought. Ali Bin Emrullah, otherwise known as Kınalızade Ali Çelebi (1511-72), authored one of the most important books on moral philosophy, titled Ahlāḳ-ı ʿAlāʾī,(supreme ethics) in post-classical Islamic thought in any Islamicate language. By focusing on various aspects of the book and by connecting the work to his contemporaries, I argue for the existence of an Ottoman tradition of virtue politics whose duration extends up to the demise of the empire. Through the example of Kınalızade, I show the particularities of virtue politics in two broad statements: i) Virtue-based political discourse takes into account a notion of politics in terms of articulating a morally-cultivated selfhood for the political subject, and ii) it is closely developed and formulated by means of the techniques of rhetorical prose composition. With these two statements, my study shows how the Ottoman tradition of virtue ethics is key to unearthing a particular trend of thinking about politics which was made possible by various virtue categories and instruments of eloquence.