Ampirik ve etik ayrımın ötesinde: İbn Haldun'un çok katmanlı siyaset ve eğitim felsefesi

Why is there a tension between the empirical and the ethical approaches in political and educational theory? For many, this tension is the legacy of David Hume who separated "is" and "ought" claims, and of logical positivism, which sharply distinguished between facts and values, hence between empirical and normative forms of inquiry as well. This philosophical principle has contributed to the indecision in the field of political theory over the last century, oscillating between empirical-positive and ethical-normative approaches, or in other words, descriptive and prescriptive perspectives, as scholars have struggled to balance these two frameworks. There was a division of labor: empirical political theorists focused on the empirical "is" of politics, while normative political theorists concerned themselves with the ethical "ought" of politics. Empirical approaches to political theory are concerned with discovering the causal laws that explain why society is the way it is. Normative approach to political theory, on the other hand, is concerned with ethical considerations, values, and prescriptions about how societies ought to be organized and governed. With the empirical and normative binary in mind, a contemporary reader of the Muqaddimah might find it challenging to ascertain under which of these two categories Ibn Khaldun's political theory most appropriately fits. To address this issue, the present study proposes revisiting Ibn Khaldun's political and educational theories in the context of the empirical-ethical binary and related discussions. One of the guiding questions of this dissertation is how helpful this distinction is for an adequate understanding of Ibn Khaldun's socio-political thinking generally, and his political and educational theories in Muqaddimah more specifically. This study reveals that Ibn Khaldun's political theory addresses both types of questions: the ontological-descriptive question about the state as "What makes a certain object a state?", and the ethical-normative question about the state as "What makes a state a just or an ideal state?". This suggests that Ibn Khaldun's political theory defies categorization within the narrow confines of the empirical-ethical binary. While Ibn Khaldun explicitly aimed to provide a scientific and realistic analysis of historical facts in a descriptive manner, differing from the utopian studies of the al-Farabi school, his work inherently serves a cognitive and instructive purpose to regulate society and guide policies, as implied in the name of his book, Kitāb al-ʿIbar. This aspect also speaks to the recent debate on ideal and non-ideal political theory, in terms of how to justify normative claims in order not to be 'too abstract.' The normative claims of the Muqaddimah are justified by the real facts of life and the divine revelation, which go hand in hand, providing a model for contemporary political theory that seeks to integrate the empirical and the ethical in how the ideal might be achieved in practical steps. The primary goal of this dissertation is to elucidate why there is no exclusion between the empirical and normative dimensions in Ibn Khaldun's political theory and to explain how this integration is achieved. The main argument of this study is that the philosophical foundations of Ibn Khaldun's political theory provide a multiplex framework in which the empirical and ethical dimensions coexist harmoniously, without being mutually exclusive or in binary opposition. It is this multiplex paradigm that makes his thought resistant to modern ways of thinking that typically operate within set dichotomies, i.e., distinctions that have translated into separations. Once the multilayered framework underpinning Ibn Khaldun's socio-political thinking is in view, we can then understand how his political and educational theories are simultaneously empirical and ethical, or descriptive and prescriptive, and why they are inevitably so.