Özet:

This paper attempts to provide a general overview of ethical studies published in the first century of the Turkish Republic in three generations. Hilmi Ziya Ulken, Takiyettin Mengüşoglu and Nurettin Topçu are some of the eminent first-generation Turkish philosophers who have been sent to several European countries such as France, Germany and Italy for their postgraduate education. They mainly introduced ethical theories to Turkish philosophy circles. Nurettin Topçu, who wrote his dissertation on the concept of revolution in France, emphasizes in his writings the close relation between morality and religion and puts forth a religion based ethical account of morality. The problem of morality or of value constitutes a central issue in Ulken’s studies; he asserts that the subject matter of moral philosophy is to study action, particularly the agent of an action, as well as the realm of values underlying an action. Mengüşoğlu applied an ontological and anthropological approach to ethical issues and wrote an article entitled “A Critical Preparation for a Philosophical Ethics.” As the representative of the second generation of Turkish philosophers, one can name, for example, İoanna Kuçuradi, Ahmet İnam and Betül Çotuksöken. İoanna Kuçuradi introduces a theory of value and a new theory of ethics following the footsteps of the philosophers Immanuel Kant, Friedrich Nietzsche, Nikolai Hartmann and Takiyettin Mengüşoglu. The fundamental characteristic of her ethics is its starting point, namely, the action of a person, as well as its reliance on values or on the value knowledge of human being. Kuçuradi’s ethics differs from other theories of ethics in respect of the peculiarity of its object. An action does not consist of a behavior; a behavior or doing is merely the last stage of an action. In each action there are two further steps, which come before doing (or not doing), namely, the stage of evaluation, and experience in a particular sense. Kuçuradi argues that an action cannot be evaluated simply in terms of the determination of the will underlying an action, in the way in which Kant considers it to be the case. Betül Çotuksöken, one the eminent Turkish philosophers of the second generation, promotes an ethics of anthropontology, which is a natural extension her account of the human being, which she refers to as anthropontology. Ahmet İnam tries to develop an account of ethics based on the concepts as love, heart (gönül) and life (can), and this account of ethics finds its roots in the Anatolian ground, namely, from the Turkish culture(s). The third generation of Turkish scholars are represented in this paper with the names of Hakan Poyraz, Harun Tepe, Demet Kurtoğlu Taşdelen and Süleyman Dönmez, taking into consideration their works on various ethical issues.