Viyana Çevresi, sunduğu program ve felsefe-bilim ilişkisine dair görüşleriyle 20. yüzyıl felsefesinin kurucu unsurlarından biridir. Viyana Çevresi felsefesini tarihsel bağlamından bağımsız olarak, mantıkçı olguculuk ve benzeri birtakım kavramlarla sınırlı anlama girişimleri, çevrenin gerçekte nasıl bir program önerdiğinin kavranmasını güçleştirmiştir. Hatta bu tür girişimler, Viyana Çevresinin metafiziğe ilişkin savlarından da yola çıkarak, çevrenin programının, toplumsal ve insani olanı dışlayıcı bir öze sahip olduğu biçiminde yorumlanmasına neden olmuştur. Bu yazıda, Viyana Çevresinin bilim ve felsefeye dair sunduğu programın, günümüz felsefesinin biçimlenmesinde etkin bir rol oynadığı, bu rolün de sanılanın aksine Viyana Çevresinin toplumsal konulara ilişkin ortaya koyduğu tezlerden de kaynaklandığı, tarihsel ve düşünsel bir arkaplan soruşturmasıyla gösterilmeye çalışılacaktır.With its considerations on the relations between science and philosophy and its declared program, Vienna Circle is one of the constitutive elements of the twentieth century philosophy. Attempts to understand the Circle limited with some expressions like logical positivism, regardless of its historical context, have led to some difficulties about the real nature of its program. Such attempts, moreover, have adduced from the thoughts of the Vienna Circle on metaphysics that the program of the Circle, in essence, was hostile to anything that is social and human. In this paper, through a historical and intellectual background inquiry it is tried to put that the declared program of Vienna Circle about science and philosophy has played a crucial role for the formation of the philosophy today, and unlike as one may think, this role can only be conceived fully if one respects the theses of the Circle about the social problems properly.

In this article, I aim to present some of the reasons why consciousness is viewed as an intractable problem by many philosophers. Furthermore, I will argue that if these reasons are properly appreciated, then McGinn’s so-called mysterianism may not sound as far-fetched as it would otherwise sound.

Derivative moral responsibility is not moral responsibility at all. Much of the confusion found in the literature concerning moral responsibility and the free will problem can be traced back to a penchant to reconcile our philosophical theories of moral responsibility with our folk commonsense linguistic accounts of moral responsibility, a tradition that is notable for its utter lack of making two important distinctions - (1) the distinction between derivative moral responsibility and non-derivative moral responsibility (what Galen Strawson calls “true moral responsibility”) and (2) the distinction between the scope and degree of one’s moral responsibility.1 The failure to make such distinctions, ultimately, leads to confusion in interpreting the content of folk intuitions about moral responsibility, and as a result leads many philosophers to adopt watered down, or overly complex theories of moral responsibility. In “The Epistemic Requirements for Moral Responsibility,” Carl Ginet fails to make such distinctions, and as a result the requirement he arrives at is unwieldy at best. By making such distinctions, I will provide a much more straightforward account of what moral responsibility requires.

Foucault's philosophy is often divided into three periods: the archeological period of the 1960's, the geneological period of the 1970's, and the ethical period of the 1980's. Considering the subjects Foucault worked on, the methods he employed, and the nature of his analyses in the 1960's, 1970's, and 1980's, it seems prima facie that there is a considerable difference between the different periods of Foucault's career. Nevertheless, Fooucault claims that he has been working on the same subject, that is, the construction of subjective experience, throughout most of his career. The aim of this paper is to question, via the presentation of two sexual case studies taken from the history of psychiatry, what kind of portrait of Foucault has painted if we take him by his word. These studies will also help us ask how we can give an account of the construction of sexual experience from the perspective of Foucault the archaeologist, the genealogist, and at the same time, the ethicist.

This is a metaphysical and conceptual analysis of the concepts ‘change’ and ‘continuity’. The Buddhists are in agreement with Heraclitus that all are flowing and nothing remains. However, the Buddhists have a much more elaborate theory about change and continuity, and this theory is a key element in the entire Buddhist system of related doctrines, viz., that of karma and rebirth, the possibility of Liberation (nirv na) and others. Simply put, the Buddhist emphasizes that change is there in every aspect of reality.According to a later developed form of the Buddhist teaching, change is absolutely pervasive, and even these particles are subject to change as they are nothing more than putative objects which are conceptualized to be such and such, and without the conceptualization they are ‘nothing’ at all. (This is known as the Doctrine of Emptiness). Hence it seems that continuity is not possible. But in fact according to the later theory, change is not only possible, it is accepted as part and parcel of everyday life. The fact that nothing at all remains the same does not imply that continuity is not possible, since continuity does not always have to be that of an inherently existing object. A changing object can be continued also, in roughly the same sense as we say that an event, like a drama, continues even though everything in it is changing. The thread that ties the disparate elements of the event together in this case lies within our own conceptual imputation. This does not imply that everything is subjective, since the distinction between subject and object presupposes the idea of an absolutely existing individual self, which all Buddhist schools rejects. So in this later theory, absolute change is not possible because there is, ultimately speaking nothing to change, and when there is no change there is no continuation either. This is not to deny the empirical fact of changes and continuities that are present to us; things are there and they are indeed changing. What is being denied here is the belief that that there are essences to things which endure through all the changes. Since things are empty (of inherently existing nature) they can change, and continuity is only possible, not because there is something that exists and endures, but because there is change. A drama that does not move cannot be continued.The foregoing discussions of the Buddhist theories have many implications for the dialog between science and religion. One point is that science still seems to subscribe to the object/subject distinction. But if change and continuity are not real in the ultimate sense, then perhaps the distinction should be reconsidered. Another point concerns how to find continuity amidst all the change. But perhaps in some important sense continuity depends on us.

A discussion of how the criticisms of ethical theory in Søren Kierkegaard and Bernard Williams both reinforce each other and also provide some challenges to each other. Despite Williams’ brief and dismissive encounter with Kierkegaard around the reading of a ancient tragedy, both oppose any tendency to see the characters in those tragedies as lacking in agency. Both are consistently concerned with how the individual struggles for some ethical agency and how no individual can be free of the influence of chance or error. Kierkegaard and Willliams are shown to both oppose relativism and communitarianism in ethics, along with utilitarianism and to both have an interest in plurality of ethical ideas of how to live.

Adaletin ölçütü konusu çağdaş siyaset felsefesi içerisinde önemli bir yer tutar. John Rawls’un birincil değerler anlayışı ve Amartya Sen’in kabiliyetler yaklaşımı adaletin ölçütüne dair önemli bakış açıları sunmuştur. Sen’in oluşturduğu ve Martha Nussbaum’un geliştirdiği kabiliyetler yaklaşımı, Rawls’un tanımladığı birincil değerlere karşı önemli eleştiriler ortaya koyar. Bu çalışmada, bu iki önemli yaklaşımın karşıt görüşleri ve karşılıklı eleştirilerinin ötesinde, birbirlerini tamamlayıcı yanları vurgulanmaktadır. Kabiliyetler yaklaşımının, Rawls’un siyasi liberal teorisinde belirttiği örtüşen konsensüse ulaşmada önemli etkiler oluşturabileceği savunulmaktadır. Metric of justice is an important issue in contemporary political philosophy. John Rawls’s notion of primary goods and Amartya Sen’s capabilities approach have provided some important perspectives on the metric of justice. As developed by Sen and advanced by Martha Nussbaum, capabilities approach has offered a serious criticism about Rawls’s primary goods. This study, however, places an emphasis upon the complementary aspects of these two perspectives on the metric of justice, rather than their opposing ideas and criticisms against one another. It is also argued that capabilities approach may have significant effects on the way of arriving to an overlapping consensus as described in Rawls’s politically liberal theory.

This essay critically examines how Bernard Stiegler addresses the question of present-day technological developments and how they affect our understanding of education and self-formation. The first section is devoted to an account of the basics of Stiegler’s understanding of the relationship between technology and humanity as well as of his characterization of the specific problems that characterize technology today. The main part of the essay analyzes how the questions of self-care, self-formation and education are addressed in relation to these specific problems. Stiegler addresses these problems in terms of the Derridean vocabulary of the pharmakon, and accounts for the present-day technological inventions in terms of pharmacological events. It is shown that Stiegler’s account of education is difficult to combine with his attention to the pharmakon as well as to the event. In the concluding section, it is suggested that the question of self-formation in relation to pharmacological events should be reinterpreted in terms of the concept of experience.

Wittgenstein and Cavell have both been alerting me over the years to unsettling possibilities: that secularization is not always a lessening of religious intensity, that philosophy can be a religious calling, that God is less real in our theories than in the grammar of our lives. In short, I have been made aware of the possibility of a secular confession, not as an amputated version of the religious original, but as a genuine improvisation: a way of speaking to God without having to say much, if anything, about God. When Cavell’s hefty memoir came out in 2010, some thirty years after my first encounter with his writing, I assumed I would have my chance to test this possibility. This essay is the outcome of that testing.

Coherence requires more than logical consistency. Self-consistent viewpoints notoriously conflict with each other. Besides avoid logical selfcontradiction, coherent viewpoints must of course be consistent with empirical facts, including any social and interpersonal emotional facts that may be shared by all humans. But since these sets of facts are inherently probabilistic, they again lend themselves to motivated hermeneutical tweaking to make them fit one’s initial prejudices and presuppositions, trapping us again in the “hermeneutic circle” – the fact that we cannot know how much our previously-existing worldview motivates selective facts, proliferation of ad hoc hypotheses, choice of “moral intuitions,” etc. The problem of ad hoc hypotheses thus becomes crucial. Proliferation of ungrounded assumptions is motivated emotionally in the same way that believing a “conspiracy” theory requires positing unproven assumptions. Moral theory requires studying the way our emotions play into these moral “conspiracy theories.” Contemporary neuropsychology of emotion suggests that a certain kind of inner conflict model – one that grants autonomy to the exploratory drive, but in conflict with other hermeneutically relevant emotions – is especially useful in addressing the complexities of incoherence in ethical thinking.

Algı ve kavramlar arasındaki ilişki problemi bize Kantçı felsefenin mirasıdır. Burada nesne adını alan şey, zihnin sentetik birlik fonksiyonu yoluyla ortaya çıkmaktadır. Peki, bu algıda verilene kavramsal olanın eklenmesi işlemi zihnin biricik fonksiyonu olabilir mi? Eğer öyle olsaydı algı veya duyum ile kavramlar arasındaki ilişkiyi açıklamak pek güç olacaktı. Çünkü bu durumda dışsal-duyusal ile içsel-kavramsal olan arasındaki ilişki ancak bir üçüncü bağlantı aracılığıyla açıklanabilir. Oysa zihnin kavramsal-teorik fonksiyonu dışında daha başka fonksiyonları da vardır. Yani algı yalnızca nesnenin algısı olarak sınırlandırılamaz. Kavramlar algıdan tamamen farklı olmak şöyle dursun, aksine algının kendisi de bir zihinsel süreçtir. Bir başka deyişle Kant’a göre kavramlar aprioridir. Ben de bu görüşe katılıyorum ama burada asıl problem kavramların nasıl apriori oldukları ve duyumun onların içine nasıl girmekte olduğudur. Bu soru yanıtlandığında algı ile kavramlar arasındaki ilişkinin de aydınlanacağına inanıyorum. Ve bu soru algının daha arkaik fonksiyonları incelenerek yanıtlanabilir. Bu bakımdan burada ifade fonksiyonunu algı-kavram ilişkisi açısından ele alıyorum. Ben bu metinde yukarıdaki görüşü, Ernst Cassirer’in -bir tür ‘fonksiyonalizm’ olarak tanımlanan-zihin felsefesi açısından inceliyorum. The problem of relationship between perception and concepts is known with Kantian heritage. Here, what is called object, emerged in the way of the function of synthetical unity of the mind. Then our question becomes could the operation of adding the conceptual to the given in perception be the only function of mind? If it were so, (giving the explanation of) explaining the relationship between perception and concepts would hardly be possible. Since in this case a third causal function should be required to construct the relationship between external-sensorial and internal-conceptual. Thus, this requirement could only mean that mind is a conceptual apparatus. However, (mind has many other functions alongside the conceptual-theoretical function) conceptual-theoretical function is not the only function that mind does have. That is, perception could not only be limited as the perception of the object. Concept as a mental process is not different from perception; rather perception itself is a mental process too. According to Kant concepts are a priori and I agree with this view. Yet, here the point is to decide how concepts are a priori and how sensation affects concepts. Once this question is answered, (it could be possible to throw light to) the relationship between concepts and sensation could be illuminated. This problem also could be solved by investigating the more archaic functions of perception. In this context I am taking into consideration expressive-function in terms of the relationship between perception and concept.In this paper, I will address the above mentioned view in terms of Ernst Cassirer’s philosophy of mind which I define (this) as a kind of ‘functionalism.’

Frankfurt Okulu’nun sembol isimlerinden biri olan ve eleştirel kuramın temellerini atarak kuramsal çerçevesini belirleyen Horkheimer’ın sosyal felsefesinde akıl kavramı merkezi bir öneme sahiptir.Zira o, Batı dünyasında gördüğü sosyal ve kültürel kötüye gidişi nihayetinde aklın dejenerasyonuna bağlamaktadır. Bu çalışmada rasyonel bir sosyal düzenin imkânını araştıran Horkheimer’ın öznel ve nesnel akıl ayrımına dayalı akıl anlayışı doğruluk problemiyle ilişkilendirilerek ele alınmış ve diyalektiğin bu iki akıl tasavvurunun uzlaştırılmasındaki rolü tartışılmıştır.The concept of reason has a central importance in the social philosophy of Max Horkheimer, one of the leading representatives of Frankfurt School and who laid the foundation for critical theory and defined its theoretical framework. He ultimately attached social and cultural deterioration which he sees in the Western world to the degeneration of reason. In this study, Horkheimer’s understanding of reason, which is based on the distinction between subjective and objective reason, is examined by associating it with the problem of truth and dialectic’s role is discussed in reconciliation of these two ideas of reason.

There are two claims that are central to McGinn’s mysterianism: (1) there is a naturalist and constructive solution of the mind-body problem, and (2) we human beings are incapable in principle of solving the mind-body problem. I believe (1) and (2) are compatible: the truth of one does not entail the falsity of the other. However, I will argue that the reasons McGinn presents for thinking that (2) is true are incompatible with the truth of (1), at least on a fairly standard conception of the terms ‘naturalist’ and ‘constructive’, which McGinn himself seems to take for granted.McGinn’in gizemcilik adı verilen görüşü açısından iki iddia merkezi önemdedir: (1) zihin-beden probleminin doğalcı ve yapıcı bir çözümü vardır ve (2) insanlar zihin-beden problemini ilkesel olarak çözemezler. (1) ve (2), çelişik iki tez değildir: birinin doğruluğu diğerinin yanlış olmasını gerektirmez. Fakat savunacağım iddia odur ki, McGinn’in (2)’nin doğruluğuna dair verdiği gerekçeler (1)’in doğruluğu ile – McGinn’in kendisinin de varsaydığı, ‘doğalcı’ ve ‘yapıcı’ terimlerinin standart yorumlarını hesaba kattığımızda – çelişik durumdadır.

Bu çalışmada, bir yandan bilgiye yol açması bağlamında deneyimin inanca kaynak oluşturması, öte yandan insan edimlerine yol açması bağlamında inancın deneyimlenmesine olanak oluşturması nedeniyle inanç-deneyim ilişkisi irdelenecektir. İnanç-deneyim ilişkisinin olanaklılığı ve bu ilişkinin kuşkulu doğası, Davidson ve Wittgenstein gibi iki önde gelen çözümleyici filozofun konuyla ilgili açıklamaları dikkate alınarak araştırılmaktadır.Yazının ana savını şu temel fikir oluşturmaktadır: Sanılanın aksine, ne deneyimler inanç için sağlam ve kesin bir temel oluştururlar ne de deneyimler bilinmek için inançlara gereksinim duyarlar. In this paper, the relationship between belief and experience will be investigated because on the one hand, experience creates a source for beliefs which leads knowledge and on the other hand it makes the experience possible, which leads human actions. Considering the analysis of two prominent analytic philosophers Davidson and Wittgenstein, the relationship of belief and experience, and the questionable nature of this relationship will be studied. The basic claim of this paper consists of the following primary idea: Contrary to what is believed, neither experiences form a firm and certain basis for beliefs, nor experiences are in need of beliefs to be known.