1 Introduction

My paper focusses on the early reception of Bertrand Russell’s scientific philosophy in 1930s Turkey, which appears to be minor in comparison to a second wave of reception after the Second World War, in Turkey as well as in other countries around the world. Many of Russell’s books on ethics and politics¹ as well as his bestseller on “History of Western philosophy” (1945) were translated into Turkish in the 1960s, and these translations gave rise to numerous academic studies during this period.² Alongside the tremendous success of these popular writings, however, Russell’s concept of philosophy inspired some developments in semantics, analytic philosophy and general philosophy of science, both in Istanbul and in Ankara.³ This attention on Russell’s scientific philosophy is therefore generally seen as the start of an analytic tradition in post-war Turkish academic philosophy,⁴ indicative of a new shift toward the United States.

Yet a first step in this reception should be located in the 1930s, in relation to the efforts among scientifically oriented philosophers to popularize science and unify the movement of scientific philosophy in Europe and beyond. In the context of the early Republic of Turkey, these efforts were associated with a political concern to develop mass education through a vast reform of the school and university system. In this ideological framework, science-related philosophies were expected to serve the Western-centric reform policies implemented in Turkey from the late 1920s onwards, aimed at reorganising the society on a national and secular basis. I argue that this early reception is exemplary of a shift that occurred from a French-oriented transmission in the fields of philosophy and social sciences, towards other countries, notably Germany (Roure 2022a, 138) and the United States (Roure 2026), even if the French language remained dominant in Turkish academia and often the medium to apprehend works originally written in other languages. Albeit my focus in this paper is on the Turkish context, my general perspective is not so much a restriction of the study of this reception to one country but rather to highlight, through it, the transnational and pluralistic dimension of early scientific philosophy in Europe.⁵ This dimension increased considerably during the interwar period through the development of specialized journals, the exchanges during international conferences and congresses,⁶ and academic mobility—including forced migration.

I’ll start with some remarks on the institutional and ideological context of the academic reception of scientific philosophies in Turkey, favoured by a scientistic offensive against metaphysics and traditions. Then, I’ll present and compare different contributions to the early reception of Russell’s philosophy, which tends to associate his analytic paradigm with American pragmatism (Mehmet Saffet) or with the European movement of logical empiricism (Adnan Adıvar, Hilmi Ziya Ülken). Although this reception contributed to the inclusion of Russell’s philosophy in the teaching curriculum and to the determination of the intellectual and linguistic field of scientific philosophy in Turkey, this endeavour will be almost totally ignored in later developments of analytic philosophy and philosophy of science in 1960s Turkey.

2 Scientific Philosophy in the Context of the Turkish University Reform

The first translations and publications concerning Bertrand Russell’s scientific philosophy in Turkey coincides with the university reform movement implemented in the 1930s. The aim of these reforms was to break up with the Ottoman academic heritage, then embodied by the University of Istanbul and—at least until 1914—its privileged orientation toward France. Nevertheless, and as it has been rightly pointed out by Christoph Herzog: “Almost the entire philosophical development in modern Turkey has its roots in the late Ottoman period. This applies to philosophical currents (Denkströmungen) as well as to forms of institutionalisation” (Herzog 2021b, 716).

2.1 The university as a means to disseminate the “modern scientific spirit”

The idea of founding a secular university in Istanbul first emerged in the nineteenth century as part of a broader reform of the Ottoman educative system following the reform edict of 1856 (Somel 2001, 42). Aimed to develop a modern educational system according to European criteria, this reform was initially inspired by the French Minister of Public Education Victor Duruy (1863–1869), who personally supported the foundation of the Ottoman Imperial High School of Galata-Séraï (Galatasaray Mekteb-i Sultânîsi) in 1868, as a prototype for the development of secular secondary education in line with the Ottomanist discourse, i.e., open to Ottoman pupils of all confessions. Established in 1900 after several attempts, the University of Istanbul (Dârülfünûn-ı Şâhâne) was the first European-type university in the Ottoman Empire, which has been considered as an “attempt to bridge the gap with Europe resulting from the Industrial Revolution” and to develop scientific and technical education (İhsanoğlu 2019, xi).

Supported by Ottoman administrators and public intellectuals who called themselves “münevver” (literally meaning “enlightened”) (Özervarlı 2018, 365), the new university system dedicated to “modern sciences” was initially not intended to replace the traditional system of medrese education, which included “traditional sciences” (‘ulūm naqlīyah) such as Arabic linguistics and grammar, rhetoric, and religious studies, as well as “rational sciences” (‘ulūm ‘aqlīyah) such as logic or metaphysics (İhsanoğlu 2019, x). Prior to 1869, about 166 medrese were active in Istanbul and 665 in the European provinces of the empire (İhsanoğlu 2019, ix); these did not depend on the state but were financed by religious foundations (waqf). Up until the medrese were definitively closed by decree in 1924, the Ottoman university coexisted with these schools and was aimed, according to some commentators, to build “a harmonious synthesis between Islamic and Western values” (İhsanoğlu 2019, xii).

The Turkish university reform in the 1930s led to the re-establishment of the University in Istanbul in 1933 and to the creation of a new university in Ankara in 1937. The Ottoman University, which had been strongly criticised by the new government in the late 1920s, was closed overnight and immediately re-founded with a new name—the French-based neologism “Üniversite” replacing the Ottoman-Turkish word “Dârülfünûn”, which was itself a neologism made up of two Arabic words literally meaning “house of sciences”—the term “fen” referring in Turkish to natural sciences. This movement implied the strengthening of state control over academic institutions; it was accompanied at Istanbul University by massive dismissals of previous professors and it benefited from the emigration of scholars who had fled Nazism between 1933 and the end of the second world war (Widmann 1973). It is in this context that Hans Reichenbach was appointed Professor of Systematic Philosophy and Logic in Istanbul and placed at the head of the Philosophy Department in 1933 (Irzik 2011; Roure 2022b).

In its declared attempt at a radical break with the Ottoman past, the 1933 university reform was accompanied by a discourse of modernisation-westernisation (garplılaşma) based on a certain ideal of scientific and national education. These ideological elements undoubtedly favoured the diffusion of the “modern scientific spirit” and the interest in philosophies oriented towards the sciences, despite the fact that such an orientation of academic philosophy was already perceptible in the late Ottoman period and in the 1920s, as I shall shortly describe in the next section.

2.2 Philosophy of science or scientific worldview? French positivism vs. American pragmatism

The development of an Ottoman university was accompanied from the very beginning by an interest in emerging currents in European philosophy, designated as the “new philosophy” (felsefe-i cedide) and related to the popularization of the natural sciences in the late nineteenth century. The late Ottoman period has been marked by a significant reception of “vulgar materialism”, including Ernst Haeckel’s evolutionary monism through the translations by Bahâ Tevfîk and Ahmed Nebîl [Çıka] (Haeckel [1326] 1908, [1911] 2014, [1911] 2015; compare Roure 2020, 327–29),⁷ and by a veritable craze for French positivism, whether the positivist doctrine of Auguste Comte, popularised by the Young Turkish politician Ahmed Rızâ (1858–1930), or the sociology of Émile Durkheim which inspired Ziya Gökalp (1876–1924) and his school (Özervarlı 2017). Similar to what can be observed in other European countries before the First World War, this interest in various forms of scientism went far beyond academic philosophy to become rather a popular philosophy disseminated through the cultural press, although it also had a strong impact on the development of sociology and pedagogy as practical disciplines.

The First World War marked a further and often neglected stage in the reception of science-related philosophies at the University of Istanbul, including non-rationalistic trends. This development was reinforced, if not initiated, by an institutional orientation towards Germany. At the instigation of the Prussian Ministry of Culture and in the context of the “German Cultural Mission”, Günther Jacoby was appointed in 1915, as a full professor at the University of Istanbul, where he was in charge of reforming the philosophy department and expressed his firm intention to counter the French influence and what he looked down on as “a popular form of writing that imitates French models in a dependent way” (Jacoby 1917a, 349; see also Roure 2020, 330). In this context, Jacoby seems to have encouraged an interest in American pragmatism,⁸ framed as an alternative model against both French positivism and Bergsonism. During his stay in Istanbul, Jacoby co-founded the Faculty of Letter’s journal, Darülfünun Edebiyat Fakültesi Mecmuası, in which an Ottoman-Turkish translation of his article on “Henri Bergson, Pragmatism and Schopenhauer” was published (Jacoby 1917b). Initially published in The Monist, this article was an answer to debates on Bergson’s philosophy, referring among others to an article by Russell published in the same journal (Jacoby 1912, 593). Jacoby argued that Bergson could not be considered, as “the American pragmatists” do, as a pragmatist (Jacoby 1912, 594). Referring to a paper by Arthur Lovejoy on the similarities between Bergson and Schopenhauer (Jacoby 1912, 607), Jacoby presented Bergson as an inconsistent thinker, unconsciously influenced by the “Schopenhauer craze” which developed in France at the end of the nineteenth century. Jacoby’s impact, both institutionally and in the reception of pragmatism, has been largely overlooked. It is worth noting, however, that his assistant at the Dârülfünûn, Mehmed Emin (Erişirgil) (Dölen 2013, 124), is considered to have moved from Bergsonism to American pragmatism (Kaya 2010). He was the Professor of History of Philosophy at the Dârülfünûn from 1918 to 1926 and interrupted his academic career to work for the Ministry of Education.

However, independently of Jacoby’s influence, philosophers of science rejecting materialism and positivism had a significant reception in Turkish academia, starting from the First World War and during the 1920s. This is the case for the conventionalist Henri Poincaré, some of whose works were rapidly translated into Turkish (Poincaré [1330] 1914, 1927) by the mathematician Salih Zeki (1864–1921), and the spiritualist Émile Boutroux (1845–1921), who authored in 1911 a book on William James and whose works on the relationship between science and religion were translated into Turkish during the 1920s (Boutroux 1927), including the book from his thesis on “the contingency of the laws of nature” (1874), translated by Hilmi Ziya Ülken in 1926 (Ülken 1936, 19; compare Boutroux 1947). Late Ottoman and early Turkish academic philosophy reflected the vivid debates about the role of science in society that divided French academic philosophy until the Great War and accompanied the development of social sciences, between proponents of a republican and secularized philosophy of science based on a scientistic worldview, and their opponents underlining the powerlessness of science to solve “the mysteries of the world” (Schöttler 2013, 96–97).

2.3 Pragmatism and education reform policies in 1920s Turkey

Some interpreters have described the interest in American pragmatism and Bergsonism during the early decades of the Turkish Republic as a reaction against French positivism (Bisbee 1951, 159). Yet American pragmatism was not just another philosophical trend in Turkey, but it was at the core of the discussions on education reforms (see Herzog 2021b, 719). American pragmatism, according to Arda Denkel (1997, 88), “left no profound trace in philosophical education” but “greatly influenced pedagogical policies.” An excellent manifestation of this can be seen in the well-known role of John Dewey in the Turkish education reform and education philosophy in the mid-1920s. After educational missions in Japan (1919) and China (1919–1921), and following an invitation by the Turkish government, Dewey went to Turkey in 1924 where he prepared a “Report and Recommendation upon Turkish Education” (Dewey 1939), preceded by a “Preliminary Report” (both reports were published in Dewey 1983). Promoting a “program of progressive and gradual development” supporting “the development of Turkey as a vital, free, independent, and lay republic in full membership in the circle of civilized states”, Dewey advocated in his reports the development of mass education allowing the “intellectual participation” of the citizens “in the political, economic, and cultural growth of the country” (Dewey 1983, 275). According to this goal, his recommendations focused more on primary and secondary education, with an emphasis on professionalisation. While recognising the importance of a leading action of the Ministry of Education, he warns against the risks of excessive centralisation and bureaucratisation of the education system (Dewey 1983, 280), emphasizing that the “need of unity in the education system” should not be understood as “uniformity”, but rather be conciliated with diversity and flexibility.⁹ Many of his recommendations encouraged internationalization: Members of the commissions in charge of the reform policies should be sent abroad, especially to the United States, and “foreign educational literature, especially that of progressive schools” should be translated (Dewey 1983, 278). He also recommended sending abroad selected “progressive” teachers for “further studies” (Dewey 1983, 287) as well as the most promising university students, with a “system of fellowships for foreign continued studies” (Dewey 1983, 291). Last but not least, Dewey underlined that if French will “probably … continue to be the foreign language most in demand”, “some schools should give instruction in German, others in English, and possibly some in Italian” (Dewey 1983, 290).

In the 1920s, many of Dewey’s books on education were translated into Turkish, two of them—School and Society (Mektep ve Cemiyet, [1340] 1923) and Democracy and Education (Demokrasi ve Terbiye, 1928)—by “Avni”. A main figure of the educational reform in the interwar period, Hüseyin Avni [Başman] (1887–1965) became the director of the new founded Pedagogical Institute in Ankara in 1929 and served as a member of the University Reform Commission in 1933 and afterwards as inspector (müffetiş) in charge of the Turkish students abroad. However, this impact of Dewey’s ideas on the reform of Turkish education can be partially explained by the early development of academic exchanges with Columbia University, an aspect often neglected in the study of the global influence of Dewey’s philosophical views (see e.g., Bruno-Jofre and Schriewer 2012). A significant example of these academic exchanges can be found in the figure of Mehmet Saffet [Engin] (also orthographised as Mehmed Safved), who wrote in 1933 the very first account of Russell’s philosophy in Turkey.

3 Mehmet Saffet’s Pragmatist Reading of Russell’s Philosophy

Best known under his later name Arın Engin and for his contributions to Turkish nationalism and Kemalist ideology after 1935 (Kaşker 2002), Saffet played a certain role in the introduction of Dewey’s concept of progressive education in Turkey. Starting from 1922, he studied at the Colombia University Department of Sociology and Pedagogy, where he was a student of Dewey, and completed a “bachelor of science” (1926) and a “master of arts” (1928). Upon his return to Turkey, he worked as the teacher of philosophy and sociology at the Gazi Institute for Education between 1928 and 1933, a teacher’s school established in 1927 in Ankara initially under the name “Middle [Stage] Teacher’s School and Education Institute” (Orta Muallim Mektebi ve Terbiye Enstitüsü). During his time at the Pedagogical Institute, Mehmet Saffet published several textbooks in Turkish on philosophy and the social sciences, such as a booklet on the naturalist refoundation of psychology through behaviourism (Saffet 1933a). His textbook entitled Contemporary European Philosophy (From Kant to Our Days) (Saffet 1933b), based on his lecture notes from Columbia University, includes the very first account of Russell’s philosophy in Turkey, among other key authors such as Henri Bergson, William James and John Dewey. His interpretation of Russell’s philosophical views stresses and radicalises the critique of mysticism and Bergsonism, while neutral monism is seen as an extension of the new American realism, compatible with naturalistic and evolutionist tendencies.

In this textbook, and after a short biographic presentation emphasizing Russell’s international reputation and academic mobility,¹⁰ Saffet provides general accounts of Russell’s philosophy, under different rubrics such as “Logic” (Mantık), “Logical Atomism” (Mantıkî atomizm), “Mind and Matter” (Zihin ve madde), “Ethics” (Ahlâk), Philosophical Anthropology—“The Place of Human in the World” (İnsanın kâinattaki mevkii), and “Russell as a Reformist” (Islahatçı Russell). Preceding the first Turkish translations of Russell, this account of his life and doctrine refers to several original works, including Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy, Mysticism and Logic, [An Outline of] Philosophy, and ABC of Relativity. Other works by Russell are also mentioned in a footnote in the text, such as the 1900 book on Leibniz’s philosophy, The Problems of Philosophy (1912), Why Men Fight (1916), and Proposed Roads to Freedom: Socialism, Anarchism, and Syndicalism (1918).

Saffet portrays Russell in the first three sections as a defender of the “scientific method” (ilmî usûl), against Bergsonism and in line with pragmatist and behaviourist approaches. This interpretation, which tends to erase Russell’s criticisms of philosophical trends in the United States, had the function of reasserting a radical opposition between Bergsonism and pragmatism, in favour of the latter.

Russell is firstly described as a “great mathematician”, who came to logic and philosophy from this discipline and, “like a new Pythagoras, wanted to reduce the universe to mathematics” (Saffet 1933b, 145–46). Although he refers in a footnote to the Introduction to Mathematical Philosophy (Riyazî felsefeye methal, Russell [1919] 1920), Saffet focusses above all on Russell’s popular essay “Mysticism and Logic”,¹¹ considered as an “answer to Bergson” (Saffet 1933b, 145). In this essay, Russell “strongly attacked mysticism and promoted the scientific method”, demonstrating “the virtues of logical thinking and the greatness of mathematics” from both an epistemological and an aesthetic perspective (Saffet 1933b, 145). Alongside several unmarked quotations, we find, translated into Turkish, the statement from Mysticism and Logic that mathematics possesses “not only truth, but supreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture” (Russell 1918, 60; Saffet 1933b, 145).

Saffet further explains in this book the changes in Russell’s philosophical views through “the deepening application of his logical method”, interpreting logical atomism as a rejection of both idealism and realism, based on the idea that it is possible to reach “ultimate atomic facts [nihaî atomik vakıalar] by means of logical analysis [mantıkî tahlili]” (Saffet 1933b, 146). Alluding to the theory of relations presented in the “Mathematical Principles” (Riyazî prensipler), Saffet claims that Russell’s theory of descriptions and his distinction between the grammatical and the logical forms of a proposition have been “one of the most important services given to the science of logic” (compare Russell 1959, 83), which also led to decisive ontological consequences—on which Saffet remains quite evasive: “A correct analysis of the truth [hakikat] does not correspond to the grammatical analysis of the sentence [cümle]. The destructive effect of this logical analysis on many philosophical theories such as existence [varlık] and reality [realite] is obviously of great importance” (Saffet 1933b, 147).

The following three sections of the chapter on Russell are related to his views on ethics (referring to the 1925 essay “What I Believe”), on anthropology, and to his political engagement, especially as a pacifist during the First World War. Saffet explains on the bases of The Analysis of Matter (Maddenin tahlili, 1927) and The Analysis of Mind (Zihnin tahlili, 1921) Russell’s neutral monist position as having evolved from the “old rationalism” toward “a pragmatic and behaviourist” approach, rejecting “consciousness” (şuur) “as an essential characteristic of the mind” (Saffet 1933b, 148). The anthropological conception that Russell called “neutral monism” (bitaraf vahdetçilik), stating that “both mind and matter can be reduced to a simpler principle, which is neither mind nor matter”, echoes according to Saffet an idea “developed in William James’ radical empiricism and defended by John Dewey and Perry” (Saffet 1933b, 150). On the basis of a truncated reading of Russell’s arguments, Saffet situates his philosophical views in the same continuity as pragmatism and American neo-realism, whereas Russell, in The Analysis of Mind, expressed only partial agreement with the “American realists”—referring with this expression to Ralf Barton Perry and Edwin Bissell Holt (Russell [1921] 1922, 25). In the same way, Saffet notes Russell’s interest in American behaviourism, but without mentioning his critical reservations about John B. Watson (Russell [1921] 1922, 29).¹²

In these sections on Russell, Saffet retains the necessity of a scientific education and more especially the need of “increasing exposure to the positive sciences (müspet ilimler)” in order to achieve peace in the world: Science helped humanity to escape from many sufferings such as “disasters, revolts, calamities and diseases” (Saffet 1933b, 151) and “future history promises us happier days if we use the energy saved by science from the struggle with nature in a rational way and do not devote it to the struggle with our fellow human beings” (1933b, 151–52). Far from seeing the First World War as a crisis of industrial and scientific civilisation, Saffet rather presents it as the starting point for a programme of modernisation likely to guarantee world peace on the basis of a “scientific” education. In a footnote on the same page, this idea is explicitly put in relation with the declarations in favour of peace and cooperation in a speech delivered by Mustafa Kemal to the members of the Balkan Union Conference. Saffet concludes this section with a translation of a short passage from An Outline of Philosophy: “Aşk, güzellik, bilgi ve hayat neşesi … Eğer felsefe bunların kıymetini bize daha yüksek bir derecede bildirirse karanlık âleme ışık vermekteki beşeriyetin müşterek gayretinde en yüksek olan vazifesini yapmış olacaktır” (Saffet 1933b, 152; compare Russell 1927, 312: “Love, beauty, knowledge, and joy of life … if philosophy can help us to feel the value of these things, it will have played its part in man’s collective work of bringing light into a world of darkness”).

Saffet’s interpretation of Russell’s ideas include some approximations and simplifications, tending to give a scientistic picture of Russell’s thought, resolutely anti-mystic and compatible with various epistemological trends in American philosophy, but also with English contributions to ethics such as Spencer’s evolutionism and utilitarianism. Referring to the Outline of Philosophy, he claims for example that Russell completely agrees with the opinion that actions inspired by love are good, while those born of hatred are bad (Saffet 1933b, 149). Russell concedes in his book, however, that he would agree “in practice” with this rather “mystical” view, but he also points to a philosophical difficulty in the original passage:

We come a little nearer to a correct view when we define right conduct by the motive or state of mind of the agent. According to this theory, acts inspired by certain emotions are good, and those inspired by certain other emotions are bad. Mystics hold this view, and have accordingly a certain contempt for the letter of the law. Broadly speaking, it would be held that acts inspired by love are good, and those inspired by hate are bad. In practice, I hold this view to be right; but philosophically I regard it as deducible from something more fundamental. (Russell 1927, 237)¹³

Missing this dialectical movement in Russell’s argument, Saffet continues his paraphrase of the passage by reconciling this view with the position that Russell defends against it, namely that it is not intentions but the consequences of a conduct that should determine its rightness or wrongness. Saffet comments on this view as an “utilitarian and pragmatic point of view (ütiliter ve prağmatik noktai nazar)” and suggests that Russell’s distinction between happiness and the good—actually an objection to the utilitarian thesis (Russell 1927, 237)—results in this idea that the consequences are to be considered as the criterion for evaluating an action as good or bad: “Happiness is not always associated with the good. For this reason, he [Russell] is also convinced of the correctness of conduct by its consequences” (Saffet 1933b, 149). Finally, Saffet emphasizes Russell’s conception of the moral code as a social production which should be constantly examined and amended, and he concludes this section on Russell’s ethics with a translation of the summarizing formula from What I Believe, “The good life is one inspired by love and guided by knowledge” (Russell 1927, 243): “İyi bir hayat aşktan ilham alan ve bilgi ile sevkedilen hayattır.”

Saffet places particular emphasis on Russell’s optimistic lack of resignation and “great courage” (büyük bir şecaatle) in offending the state officials responsible for entering the Great War, an early commitment to pacifism that cost him his chair at Cambridge University (Kembriç darülfünunun) (Saffet 1933b, 152–53). Saffet reports that stressing the purely economic reasons for the war, Russell argued that states were no longer trustworthy and that it would be preferable to be governed by syndicates and cooperatives (1933b, 153). However, Saffet emphazises Russell’s liberal conceptions and criticism of the Bolshevik revolution, a criticism that led him to believe, according to Saffet, that socialism was incompatible with democracy, “which is the principle of a liberal philosophy”, and to criticise the press as a means of propaganda (Saffet 1933b, 153). Russell is praised in this context as an ardent defender of “freedom” (hürriyet), seeing education as a means of developing the “scientific spirit” (ilmî zihniyet) against the “dogmatic ideas and beliefs” (dogmatik fikir ve itikatlar) responsible for “hatred and war” (nefret ve harp) (Saffet 1933b, 153).

To these considerations are added a series of remarks which shed further light on the global dimension of Russell’s engagement as an intellectual, this time in China: “When he went to teach in China for a year, he developed new ideas in this vast expanse of humanity.” Failing to mention the moral dimension of Russell’s admiration for China in comparison with the egoism of European nations, Saffet argues that China has been described by him as being in many respects “more advanced than Europe” (Avrupanın fevkinde) because of its “ancient and high culture” (kültür) and an unique “open-mindedness and realism” (açık fikirliliği ve realizm) in comparaison to other civilisations (medeniyet) (Saffet 1933b, 154). Again, what emerges from these remarks is a confidence in scientific rationality and its identification with civilisation.

Saffet’s interpretation of Russell’s scientific philosophy insists on its proximity to American trends such as pragmatism, new realism and behaviourism, but more importantly represents an attempt to frame it in a programme of “progressive education” in Dewey’s sense. This reading may have encouraged the first translations of Russell in Turkish, primarily aimed to serve as pedagogical material. However, as I will show in the following section, these translations also reveal several biases that were present in Saffet’s interpretation, and through which different aspects of Russell’s philosophy are simplified or distorted to legitimate changes in society that took place during the years of the republican foundation.

4 The Turkish Translations of Russell in the 1930s

The first translations of Russell in Turkish followed Saffet’s publication and they correspond to Russell’s most popular and accessible writings on scientific philosophy. They include three essays from Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays (1918), a book described by Saffet as “the most clear and easy compared to the others” (Saffet 1933b, 146) and The Problems of Philosophy (1912). Moreover, these translations share two common aspects: 1) they were all part of a book series intended for the teaching of philosophy in public high schools, and 2) they were based on the French speaking contexts of reception. In what follows, I show that direct access to Russell’s texts through these translations paves the way for another line of interpretation, one that brings Russell closer to logical empiricism.

4.1 Mistiklik ve Mantık (1935, 1940)

The Turkish translation of Russell’s Mysticism and Logic was published in 1935 under the title Mistiklik ve Mantık by Yusuf Şerif Kılıçel, who was teaching history of European literature at the Darülfünun until the 1933 reform and authored works on French literature based on a sociological approach developed by George Lanson. It is however a translation of the French version of Russell’s book, Le Mysticisme et la Logique (1922), which only includes two of the essays published in the original book, “Mysticism and Logic” and “The Study of Mathematics”, accompanied by a preface penned by the French translator Jean de Menasce—integrated into the Turkish translation with slight modifications. Menasce’s preface provides a brief bio-bibliographical presentation of Bertrand Russell and emphasises the “coexistence” of “moral and scientific tendencies” in his work (Russell 1935, vii; Russell [1921] 1922, 2).

In a social context where, starting from 1925, mystical confraternities had been banned and dervish convents closed by the Turkish authorities (Massicard 2005, 123), Saffet had presented Russell’s Mysticism and Logic as the quintessence of a scientific philosophy resolutely opposed to mysticism, held responsible for “all the miseries of humanity” (Saffet 1933b, 145). However, Russell’s first essay translated into Turkish, “Mysticism and Logic”, shows that his criticism of mysticism is in fact much more nuanced than in Saffet’s presentation. In this essay which quotes Rûmî’s Mesnevi, alongside Heraclitus and Parmenides, Russell underlines the difficulty “to disentangle the truth and the error” in such views, adding that “there is some sense” in it, although “easier to feel than to state” (Russell 1918, 21). Mysticism is therefore “to be commended as an attitude towards life [hayata karşı vaziyet olarak], not as a creed about the world [dünya sistemi olarak]” (Russell 1918, 12; 1935, 13). Referring to Parmenides and Plato, but also to Hegel and his “modern disciples”—“so far as the West is concerned”—Russell speaks of “a peculiarly interesting strain of mysticism which pervades Plato’s thought—the mysticism which may be called ‘logical’ because it is embodied [partie intégrante; tamamlayıcı bir cüz] in theories on logic” (Russell 1918, 8; [1914] 1922, 11; 1935, 8). It is interesting in this respect to consider the trajectory of the French translator, Jean de Menasce (1902–1973), who documents the European interest in mysticism, including Islamic mysticism, between the wars and in a global perspective.¹⁴

The criticism of Bergson and his concept of intuition in the essay “Mysticism and Logic” also appears more complex and nuanced than in Saffet’s presentation. Russell rather dismisses Bergson’s opposition between “intuition” (translated by hades) and “intellect” (translated by zekâ) as a false alternative. The two faculties are not mutually exclusive but complement each other, “intuition”—or better, “insight”—having a creative role and reason a regulatory one: “Reason [akıl] is a harmonising, controlling force rather than a creative [yaratıcı] one. Even in the most purely logical realm, it is insight [hades] that first arrives at what is new” (Russell 1918, 13; 1935, 15). Following the French translation, the Turkish one does not distinguish here between “intuition” and “insight”, both terms being translated by “hades”.¹⁵ Russell further proposes to replace the Bergsonian notion of intuition with that of “sensation”, as the necessary source of all knowledge: “It is neither intellect nor intuition, but sensation [ihsas], that supplies new data [yeni mutalar]; but when the data are new in any remarkable manner, intellect is much more capable of dealing with them than intuition would be” (Russell 1918, 17; 1935, 19).

However, by advocating forcing intuition out of philosophy, Russell considers that he is not opposing the very spirit that inspired mystical beliefs:

In advocating the scientific restraint and balance, as against the self-assertion of a confident reliance upon intuition, we are only urging, in the sphere of knowledge [bilgi sahasında], that largeness of contemplation, that impersonal disinterestedness, and that freedom from practical preoccupations which have been inculcated by all the great religions of the world. Thus our conclusion, however it may conflict with the explicit beliefs of many mystics, is, in essence, not contrary to the spirit [ruh] which inspires those beliefs, but rather the outcome of this very spirit as applied in the realm of thought [düşünce sahası]. (Russell 1918, 18; 1935, 21)

On the other hand, Russellian criticism does not spare philosophical systems that, while appropriating scientific data, are committed to a metaphysical belief in progress. Here again, we see a distance between Russell’s views and Saffet’s interpretation. Whereas Saffet tended to assimilate Russell to Spencer, attributing to them the idea of the superiority of scientific knowledge over all others (1933b, 145),¹⁶ Russell mockingly distances himself from Spencer’s evolutionist beliefs (1918, 24). Against Spencer, Russell advocates a “truly scientific philosophy” that should not be based on the momentary results of science, but on its method. From this perspective, Spencer’s evolutionism cannot be considered as a “true scientific philosophy”:

Evolutionism [istihalecilik], in spite of its appeals to particular scientific facts [hususî ilmî vakıalara], fails to be a truly scientific philosophy [gerçekten ilmî bir felsefe] because of its slavery to time, its ethical preoccupations, and its predominant interest in our mundane concerns and destiny. A truly scientific philosophy will be more humble [daha az kibirli], more piecemeal [daha az umumî], more arduous [daha az kolay], offering less glitter of outward mirage to flatter fallacious hopes, but more indifferent to fate, and more capable of accepting the world without the tyrannous imposition of our human and temporary demands. (Russell 1918, 32; 1935, 37)

Another essay from the book Mysticism and Logic, “On Scientific Method in Philosophy” (1914), clarifies this idea and criticises philosophical systems based on scientific results instead of being inspired by the scientific method. Based on the French translation by Menasce, this essay was translated with the title “Felsefede İlmi Metod” (Russell 1940) by Hamdi Akverdi (1907–1952), who had studied philosophy in France in the 1920s and was working at the time at the Turkish Ministry of Public Instruction. This translation was published in a series of textbooks for pedagogical purposes in high school, like Mistiklik ve Mantık five years earlier.

This essay was initially a lecture on Herbert Spencer delivered by Russell at Oxford in November 1914 and was republished in 1918 in Mysticism and Logic. Russell pays there an ambivalent tribute to Spencer, who may at first glance be considered as a “scientific philosopher” but was, in fact, rather inspired by his “strong religious sense” and his “ethical preoccupations” (Russell 1918, 97; see also Russell [1921] 1922, 21–41). Indeed, the “ethical and religious motives” constitute, he adds, “a hindrance to the progress of philosophy”: “It is, I maintain, from science, rather than from ethics and religion, that philosophy should draw its inspiration”; philosophy should be “guided by scientific method” rather than “dominated by religious and ethical ideas” (Russell 1918, 98). Russell denounces the “tendency to hasty generalisation” and the “the undue preoccupation with ethical notions” that underlie Spencer’s philosophy of evolution:

There are two kinds of evolutionist philosophy, of which both Hegel and Spencer represent the older and less radical kind, while Pragmatism and Bergson represent the more modern and revolutionary variety. But both these sorts of evolutionism have in common the emphasis on progress, that is, upon a continual change from the worse to the better, or from the simpler to the more complex. (Russell 1918, 105)

By rejecting every kind of evolutionism supporting a progressive ideology, this passage challenges Saffet’s reading, which insisted on rejecting Bergson’s philosophy in order to bring Russell closer to both Spencer and Pragmatism. Moreover, Russell’s essay explicitly rejects as unscientific any philosophy which, in the name of science, is motivated by ethical concerns or a political agenda: “The view of the world taken by the philosophy derived from ethical notions is thus never impartial and therefore never fully scientific”, since scientific philosophy “aims only at understanding the world and not directly at any other improvement of human life” (Russell 1918, 109).

4.2 Felsefe Meseleleri (1936)

Another of Russell’s popular work aimed at a large audience, The Problems of Philosophy (1912), was translated by Abdülhak Adnan Adıvar (1882–1955) and published in 1936 with the title Felsefe Meseleleri.¹⁷ The translator authored in addition a long preface, which in many respects represents the most thorough and precise presentation of Russell’s thought in Turkish at the time, as well as an interesting attempt to link Russell’s logical atomism with logical empiricism, especially in its probabilistic version advocated by Hans Reichenbach.

Abdülhak Adnan Adıvar was a medical doctor and a politician, most remembered nowadays as a historian of science. Initially close to Mustafa Kemal, he entered in dissidence after the proclamation of the Turkish Republic, taking part in the foundation of an opposition party, the “Progressive Republican Party” (Terakkiperver Cumhuriyet Fırkası). Concerned that the powers granted to the president may turn the state into a dictatorship (see Adıvar 1956), he went into exile in the late 1920s and returned to Turkey only after Mustafa Kemal’s death. During these years spent mainly in France, but also in England, Adıvar devoted his work to the study of the history of science and published his first major work on “The Science by the Ottoman Turks” (Adıvar [1937] 1939). In this book, he opposes two concepts of science—“ilim” and “fen”—and according to this divide between rational and empirical concepts of science, he made a distinction between specialists in Arabic-language science (alim) teaching at the medrese, and followers of “modern” empirical sciences (mütefennin) in the framework of the Western-oriented university institution (Adıvar [1937] 1939, 160–62).

In the 1935 preface of his translation of Russell’s Problems of Philosophy, Adıvar recounts how he first undertook to translate the book to familiarise himself with the English philosophical language, without the previous intention to publish it (Adıvar 1936, 3). Following the French and German translations, he started to revise his own translation, simplifying the language and incorporating terminological equivalents from the other languages, coming to the opinion that it may be useful for the new generations to publish it. He adds that it was his encounter with Hans Reichenbach in Paris at the 1935 Congress of Scientific Philosophy, for whom Russell “assumed, in a way, the moral presidency” (Rougier 1936, 5), that finally convinced him to publish his translation:

When Mr. H. Reichenbach, Professor of Philosophy at Istanbul University, whom I met by chance at the Congress of scientific philosophy held in Paris this year [1935], mentioned the usefulness of this book and its inclusion in the list of books that should be translated into Turkish, my opinion on this subject was further strengthened. (Adıvar 1936, 3)

Since the book represents an introduction to the problems of the theory of knowledge in general (Adıvar 1936, 3–4), Adıvar’s preface proposes to situate Russell’s own perspective, giving a general overview of his philosophy, which he called himself, “for want of a better term, logical atomism” (mantıkî atomizm) (Adıvar 1936, 17–18; Russell [1921] 1922, 14). Adıvar provides also a detailed biographical presentation, since Russell was still, in his words, “relatively little known” in Turkey—he mentions at this occasion the interest in Russell shown by another Turkish scholar, the philosopher and sociologist Mehmed İzzet (1891–1930), who became in the late 1920s the inspector in charge of Turkish students studying abroad, first in Paris and then in Berlin, where he died of leukaemia:¹⁸

Because in our contacts with some of our philosophers, we came to the conclusion that Russell was a philosopher who was relatively little known in our country and rarely, if ever, mentioned for his major works. Even in 1929, the late İzzet, a professor of philosophy at Istanbul, said that this philosopher was regarded as a mathematical logician and a difficult philosopher to understand, but when he read a translation of an article written by Russell on his own beliefs [(Russell 1929)], he wanted to print it in the journal Hayat [Life] that was published at that time. (Adıvar 1936, 5)

Although Adıvar points out that it is difficult to present Russell’s philosophy in a few pages, his preface provides a far more complete, precise and careful account than Saffet did. The same applies to the bibliographical references and the biographical section, where he makes a point of mentioning Russell’s support for women’s suffrage rights (Adıvar 1936, 9). Moreover, Adıvar distinguishes between Russell’s different types of writings, setting aside popular works and newspaper articles to concentrate on the philosophical work, of which he gives a clear and concise account.

Adıvar’s presentation of Russell’s logistical¹⁹ philosophy is based on the Harvard lectures published in Our Knowledge of the External World (Russell [1914] 1922),²⁰ in which Russell distinguishes between “three principal types among present-day philosophies”, namely “the classical tradition” including both rationalism and idealism, “evolutionism”, and “logical atomism”. Russell advocates the third type, which he describes here as close to the “new realism” represented at Harvard University (Russell [1921] 1922, 14; Adıvar 1936, 12). He distances himself from the tradition of “classical philosophy”—held by him to be still predominant in England, France and Germany, although on the decline—through the rejection of Aristotelian logic and of all the metaphysical constructions based on it: “Modern philosophy, from Descartes onwards, though not bound by authority like that of the Middle Ages, still accepted more or less uncritically the Aristotelian logic” (Russell [1921] 1922, 16; see also Adıvar 1936, 13). According to Russell, logic should be “analytic [tahlilî] rather than constructive [yapıcı]” ([1921] 1922, 18; see also Adıvar 1936, 13), an opposition also framed as an opposition between “analytic” and “synthetic” by other commentators (see footnote 32). Adıvar passes more quickly over Russell’s condescension towards philosophies he identifies as revisions of Darwin’s theory of evolution (tekamül nazariyesi), including those of Spencer but also James and Bergson (Adıvar 1936, 14; see also Russell [1921] 1922, 14, 21–41), but expresses his own disagreement with Russell’s criticism of evolutionism that he describes for his part as a “progressive” (tekamülcü) philosophy (Adıvar 1936, 12).

Adıvar’s presentation takes up afterwards the main lines of the second lecture on “Logic as the Essence of Philosophy”, especially the part on the conception of logic developed by Peano and Frege and the criticism of Aristotelian syllogistic. The presentation of Russell’s philosophy allows him to introduce a series of concepts in Turkish.²¹ What is less expected, however, is that he proposes several comparisons between Russell’s logical atomism and the philosophy of Hans Reichenbach, referring to the latter’s booklet published in French under the title La philosophie scientifique. Vues nouvelles sur ses buts et ses méthodes (Reichenbach 1932b)—a work that had been translated into Turkish in 1935. Concerning the tautological character of logic and the claim he attributes to Russell that “the theory of knowledge in a philosophy is not a key to unlock the secrets of the universe in front of us [Binaenaleyh bir felsefede bilgi nazariyesi önümüzdeki kâinat sırlarının kilitlerini açacak bir anahtar değildir]”, he thinks that Reichenbach “expresses the same idea” (Adıvar 1936, 24).²²

Adıvar further claims that according to Russell, “the laws of nature are not absolute but probabilistic (statistical) laws”, a proposition in which he sees a point of convergence with “Reichenbach and his friends contributing to the journal Erkenntnis” (Adıvar 1936, 29). On this subject, he refers the curious reader to Reichenbach’s popular writing on “Atom and Cosmos” and recommends for “the specialists” (mütehassıslar) the reading of Reichenbach’s papers on “Stetige Wahrscheinlichkeitsfolgen” (Reichenbach 1929) and “Axiomatik der Wahrscheinlichkeitsrechnung” (Reichenbach 1932a; Adıvar 1936, 29). Acknowledging the probabilistic nature of knowledge as well as the fragmented and provisional nature of science, true scientific philosophy cannot constitute a worldview or a vision of society, otherwise “science would become like religion” (Adıvar 1936, 34). The manifest influence of Reichenbach’s thought in this preface is further demonstrated in the way that Adıvar situates Russell in relation to the movement of logical empiricism. By doing so, Adıvar clearly distinguishes two distinct groups, Reichenbach and Carnap on the one hand, representatives of the “scientific philosophy”—a term then widespread in French and adopted by Reichenbach to distance himself from logical positivism—and “the philosophers of the Vienna Circle” on the other:

Since Russell’s philosophy is mainly based on mathematical and physical sciences and does not accept the old metaphysics which is outside of science, and since his logic is based on mathematical logic, it is in close contact with the scientific philosophical movement which has developed in recent years among the philosophers belonging to the Erkenntnis journal founded by Reichenbach and Carnap on the one hand, and the Verein Ernst Mach–Wiener Kreis society in Vienna on the other hand. These new philosophers even mentioned Russell as one of the English philosophers who, to a certain extent, were in line with their own approach. (Adıvar 1936, 35)

In his remarks on the Congress, Russell himself had presented the Vienna Circle as an extension of the idea, “developed to its fullest extend by Wittgenstein”, of the “importance of syntax in philosophy”, precising that “Vienna” should be understood as “a term of psychology, not of geography” (Russell 1936b, 11). Adıvar doesn’t name any representative of the Vienna Circle but interestingly he distinguished not only Reichenbach but also Carnap from the Viennese group. This distinction expresses Reichenbach’s insistence during the congress to represent the Berlin Group as distinct from the Vienna Circle and may reflect epistemological disagreements between Reichenbach and his colleagues from the Vienna Circle on probability (Gavalotti 2018, 220). Emphasising, however, the similarities rather than the differences between the different versions of logical empiricism, Adıvar concludes his presentation by quoting a statement by Russell at that event, highlighting a common rejection of metaphysics by all attendees: “In the last days [September 1935], while leaving the congress of scientific philosophy at the Sorbonne in Paris, Lord Russell’s last words to a journalist were as follows: ‘Metaphysics is dead. These lectures you have been listening to are all speeches at its funeral’” (Adıvar 1936, 35).

5 Hilmi Ziya Ülken’s Popularization of Scientific Philosophy in 1930s Turkey

Another important contribution to the early reception of Russell’s scientific philosophy in Turkey appears in the work of Hilmi Ziya Ülken (1901–1974). After starting his career as the teacher of philosophy and sociology at the Galatasaray High School, and a short research stay in Berlin in 1933 (Ülken 1943, 395), Ülken became Assistant Professor of Turkish Cultural History (Türk Medeniyete Tarihi) at the Istanbul University Department of Philosophy, where he directly worked with Hans Reichenbach.

5.1 Translating scientific philosophy

As a translator and an editor, Ülken greatly contributed to the reception of logical empiricism in 1930s Turkey (Roure 2022b, 16–20). He translated Moritz Schlick’s booklet on İlim ve Felsefe (Science and Philosophy, Schlick 1934), published in the same book collection in which Reichenbach’s booklet on scientific philosophy was translated (Reichenbach 1935). Ülken also published in this collection his translation of Gaston Bachelard Le nouvel esprit scientifique (Yeni İlmî Zihniyet, Bachelard 1935) and presented its author, alongside Marcel Boll and Louis Rougier, as a sympathiser of the philosophical trend developed by Reichenbach and Carnap in their journal Erkenntnis (Ülken 1936, 322).

The second and last issue of the journal he edited in 1935, Felsefe Yıllığı (Annals of Philosophy), aimed at “making known the scientific movements among the new Western philosophical currents” (Ülken 1935, ii), is almost completely devoted to logical empiricism and related trends in positive sciences, such as behaviourism and Gestalt psychology. The cooperation with the German exiled scholars certainly reinforced this orientation towards the sciences, which was nevertheless noticeable in Ülken’s earlier writings, for example in the first issue of Felsefe Yıllığı (1932), promoting a conception of philosophy closely related to social sciences.

Despite all this, Ülken’s role in the dissemination of scientific philosophy in Turkey in the 1930s has often been overlooked, and his later writings on philosophy of science (Felsefeye Giriş, 1963; İlim Felsefesi, 1969) have not received much attention. The changes in scientific policy at the Istanbul University Philosophy Department in the 1950s may account for the decline in interest in epistemology expressed in Ülken’s publications at that time. It was in fact when he moved to Ankara, following the coup d’état of 1960, that Ülken resumed publishing and teaching about the theory of knowledge and philosophy of science. Furthermore, Ülken’s style of writing—based on a work of compilation and translation of diverse, and not always satisfactorily referenced, sources—was severely judged by promoters of the philosophy of science in the post-war period at Ankara.²³ However, Ülken’s writings must be placed back into their context and the intent of their author. Most of his writings on European philosophy published in the 1930s were aimed as presenting in Turkish, for essentially pedagogical purposes, a body of doxographic knowledge on contemporary philosophy, using a biographical approach which at the time was characteristic of the university teaching on the history of philosophy. It is worth pointing out here that the reception of Russell’s views in 1930s Turkey, while showing a keen interest in his concept of scientific philosophy, was not accompanied by the practice of an analytical style in the writing of philosophy.

Ülken’s book on the “Philosophers of the 20th Century”, Yirminci asıl filozofları, published in 1936, is the most representative example of this endeavour. Parts of it are derived from translations of lectures given by Academics at the Sorbonne and of monographic articles or reviews published in French, with little or no personal input from Ülken himself. Without pretending to any originality, and at the cost of many breaches of the rules of philological rigour, Ülken explicitly states his intention to provide an “objective description” of the main contemporary “philosophical systems”, as a prerequisite for any possible critical analysis (1936, v). This ventriloquist’s work aims, in Ülken’s own words, “to explain today’s philosophical movements as directly as possible from the mouth of the philosophers” (1936, v),²⁴ to transfer into Turkish as much information as possible on European philosophy, in accordance with a widespread practice of “borrowing” or “quoting” (iktibas). As the translations contained in the anthology are not explicitly acknowledged, the question also arises as to their authorship.

At the same time, Ülken writes that the organisation of the topics of the book reflects his own personal intellectual trajectory, “from idealism and metaphysics to materialism” (Ülken 1936, vii). And indeed, the originality in Ülken’s book lies less in its contents than in the principle of its composition, giving a major place to philosophical currents oriented towards science and the sciences, at a time when the philosophy of science was not institutionally established anywhere. The first chapters identify four major currents in academic philosophy at the end of the nineteenth century and the beginning of the twentieth, presented as being mutually antagonistic: “irrationalist philosophy”²⁵ is responded to by “phenomenology”,²⁶ and “late 19th century idealism”²⁷ is responded to by the Anglo-American “new realism”. The following chapters deal with the philosophy of the special sciences and include developments on mathematical philosophy, philosophy of physics,²⁸ biology and sociology. The book ends with a final chapter based on a text by Friedrich Engels on historical materialism, considered to be a higher stage in the development of thought, presupposing scientific philosophy or “scientism” (scientisme), but going beyond and complementing it (Ülken 1936, vii).

What is striking in Ülken’s presentation of contemporary philosophy is its approach to science, which combines different perspectives that will later be distinguished as a general philosophy of science and the philosophy of special sciences. The order of the chapters expresses a teleological hierarchy, with scientific philosophy considered by Ülken to be more advanced than the earlier systems described in the first chapters, but less satisfactory than the intellectual apotheosis that is, according to him, historical materialism. Historical materialism must be considered, he writes, as “an attempt at an objective explanation of the world that is history”, which is “based on the ideas of evolution and revolution [tekâmül ve inkılâp] that the natural sciences [tabiat ilimleri] force us to accept” (Ülken 1936, vii).

5.2 René Kremer’s neo-scholastic account of the new realism in England and America

Ülken’s presentation of the new realism is largely based on the works published in the late 1920s by the Belgian redemptorist René Kremer (1887–1934). Kremer studied phenomenology with the clergyman Léon Noël (1878–1953) in Louvain, where he worked on a doctoral thesis on “Edmund Husserl’s Logic and Phenomenology”, which remained unpublished (Baring 2019, 51–52, 69). Instead of that, Kremer published in 1920 a book on the American new realism and critical realism, acknowledging the value of this trend for scholastic thinking (see Baring 2019, 39); “It is to be hoped that critical realists will not always remain so defiant of metaphysics. Epistemology cannot be completed without it” (Kremer 1922, 332). In his monograph, Kremer argues that the American realism, while taking its point of departure in empiricism, is combined with an “analytical intellectualism” (Kremer 1920, 155) based on modern logic understood by him as a “mathematical Platonism” (Kremer 1920, 138). In the years that followed, Kremer prepared a study on “the theory of knowledge of English new realism”, which he considered to be a less systematised movement than American neo-realism. Kremer also published short versions of both monographs in the Revue néoscolastique de philosophie (1922, 1928a), the press organ of the Higher Institute of Philosophy at the Louvain Catholic University. According to Kremer, the common denominator and novelty of realism in both countries lies in the suppression of consciousness in the grasping of the object, what in the United States resulted in an alliance with behaviourism and in the concept of “epistemological monism” (Kremer 1922, 320).

Translating Kremer, Ülken portrays Russell as a representative of the “new realism spread in England and America”, understood as a movement based on the criticism of the idea of the “subjectivity of secondary qualities” (ikinci keyfiyetlerin enfüsîliği) of the old English philosophy (Ülken 1936, 13). Neo-realism therefore consists in the primary affirmation of “the objectivity of all secondary qualities” (Kremer 1922, 321). Among the different systems developed in this movement of new realism,²⁹ aimed at reaching “the reality of the external world [dış âlemin realitesi]”—a conception shared by the scholastic realism of the Louvain school (Baring 2019, 185)—Russell “tried to understand nature and human beings through analysis by applying mathematical logic [riyazî mantık]” (Ülken 1936, 13).

Ülken’s chapter on the “The Evolution of New Realism in England” (İngiliterede Yeni Realizmin Tekâmülü, Ülken 1936, 139) is largely based on René Kremer’s book entitled La théorie de la connaissance chez les néo-réalistes anglais (1928b) and adopts the title of Kremer’s paper on “L’évolution du néo-réalisme en Angleterre” (1928a), mentioning only the book in the bibliography related to this chapter (Ülken 1936, 425). This applies in part to the chapter plan and section headings: “Moore ve bilginin tahlili” (Moore and the analysis of knowledge, Ülken 1936, 145; see also Kremer 1928b, 21), “[Samuel] Alexander” (Ülken 1936, 171–82; Kremer 1928b, 80–103), “[Charlie Dunbar] Broad” (Ülken 1936, 182–84) and “[Alfred North] Whitehead” (Ülken 1936, 191–206). Ülken’s chapter is a condensed translation of Kremer’s book, removing references and Kremer’s most explicit value judgements against neo-realism. The presentation of Russell’s philosophy, which forms the essential part of the chapter (Ülken 1936, 146–70), corresponds to the third and fourth chapters of Kremer’s thesis, “La méthode de la philosophie et la nature de la verité” (Kremer 1928a, 41–80) and “La réalité et l’esprit selon M. Russell” (Kremer 1928a, 41–80), with a few omissions. Only the last section of the chapter does not come from Kremer’s work: it is, surprisingly enough to end a chapter dealing with English neo-realism, a presentation of the French philosopher Raymond Ruyer (1902–1987) (Ülken 1936, 207–10), who at that time had published his Esquisse d’une philosophie de la structure (1930). In addition to this title, Ülken’s bibliography for this chapter includes a work by Jean Wahl, Vers le Concret: Études d’Histoire de la Philosophie Contemporaine (William James, Whitehead, Gabriel Marcel) (1932), particularly the section devoted to Whitehead.

Following Kremer, Ülken presents Russell’s philosophy as moving from an “analytic realism” (tahlilî realism) to a philosophy based on logic called “logical atomism” (mantıkî atomculuk), explaining the coherence of this philosophy, with its many variations over time, by the primacy of the method (usul) over doctrine. Ülken takes Russell as a “complete” empiricist, but his empiricism differs, however, from classical English empiricism, because it “takes account of the reality as it is without first imposing a theory on it”: certain propositions (kaziye) are “self-evident” (bizatihi bedihi) and allow us, by means of analysis or with evidence (bedâhet), to reach “general truths” (umumî hakikatler) (Ülken 1936, 146; see also Kremer 1928b, 41–42). This is why logic can form the basis of philosophy; not Aristotelian logic but rather the “modern logic” that encompasses mathematics. “Contemporary logic” (muasır mantık) is an “extremely abstract science” (fevkalâde mücerret bir ilim), and not an “art” (san’at) like Aristotle’s logic, also referred to as “elementar” or “primitive” (iptidaî) logic. Logistic possesses “a precision [sarihlık] and flexibility [seyyallık]” that ordinary logic lacks, but Russell’s philosophical writings are devoid of “algorithmic notation”—an expression mistranslated with the term “Logaritmik” (Ülken 1936, 147; Kremer 1928b, 42–43). This logicism (Logistik),³⁰ whose function is that of “a table of possibilities, a laboratory of hypotheses” (bir imkânlar cetveli, bir faraziyeler laboratuvarı),³¹ allows us to renew philosophy by focussing on “logical forms” (mantikî şekiller). Borrowing from Leibniz both the idea of logistic and the definition of philosophy as “the science of possible” (mümkünün ilmi), Russell urges us to apply to philosophy the “analytical method” (tahlilî usulü), experienced in scientific practice, rather than the traditional “synthetical method” (terkibî usul).³²

The following part of the translation outlines Russell’s criticism of the British idealism movement (see Griffin 2013) as represented in Oxford by Francis Herbert Bradley, Bernard Bosanquet and Thomas Hill Green. Ülken refers to Russell’s Philosophical Essays, a book first published in 1910, that he quotes from Kremer, introducing in his own text the French terms (Ülken 1936, 149–53). The passage is a paraphrastic résumé of the chapter on “The Monistic Theory of Truth” (Russell 1910, 131–46), in which Russell responded to the polemical criticism from the neo-Hegelian philosopher Harold Joachim (1868–1938) (Griffin 2009). This controversy is completed by a confrontation between Russell’s analytic philosophy and other attempts in this direction by “Nietzsche, Spencer, Bergson and the pragmatists” (Ülken 1936, 154; Kremer 1928b, 53). Based on the chapter “On Truth and Falsehood” in Philosophical Essays, Russell’s theory of truth is presented and confronted with those of the pragmatists. The pragmatist authors—James, Schiller and Dewey—are valued in the commentary, by virtue of the “theory of the will to believe” (inanmak iradesi), which is compatible with religious questions. The last section, “Reality and Mind According to Russell” also stems from Kremer’s work, of which it is an abridged translation. Kremer here discusses further Russell’s criticism of British idealism and emphasises his connections with the American new realism and behaviourism (Ülken 1936, 170; Kremer 1928b, 80).

Ülken’s account of Russell’s philosophical views in the chapter on “New Realism” (yeni realism) is entirely based on Kremer’s book and interpretation, which makes it difficult to reconcile it with the probabilistic version of logical empiricism. Although the translation is not indicated as such, Ülken does not conceal its translation activity but rather highlights it, marking technical terms and expressions in bold and sometimes adding the French equivalent in brackets. However, Ülken also seems to have used other sources, also in French, in his eclectic presentation of Russell’s philosophy, to associate him with the logical empiricism of the Vienna Circle. In fact, these considerations are absent from Kremer’s work and represent a collision, in Ülken’s account, between two incompatible interpretation strands, those of the neo-scholastic realism and of logical empiricism. Altering a passage from Kremer in his translation, Ülken describes Russell’s empiricism as a “logical empiricism” (mantıkçı ampirizm), defined as an empirical analysis of logical laws: “The empirical is not the opposite of the logical form, necessary and immutable, but it is the opposite of the subjective [enfüsî] and the ideal” (Ülken 1936, 184).³³ Following Kremer, however, Ülken describes Russell’s empiricism as a “rigorous intellectualism” (kat’î bir zihincilik), as distinct from a “strict rationalism” (mahdut akılcılık) (Ülken 1936, 148; Kremer 1928b, 45): If philosophy uses the method of science, its propositions must be a priori, in the sense that “they cannot be proved or disproved by empirical evidence [tecrübe delili]”, a conception which is not reconcilable with the disaggregation of the synthetic a priori which, according to Hans Reichenbach, characterises logical empiricism.³⁴

Ülken concludes by stating that the new realist philosophy leads in two directions that have “the same epistemological root” (epistemolojik kök), namely a logical direction and a metaphysical one. About the logical direction, he adds that the convergence between logical empiricism and Ernst Mach’s critical empiricism gave rise in Vienna to a “new positivism”, which must be seen as “a continuation of Russell’s philosophical method”.³⁵ Russell’s “logical empiricism” is finally described by Ülken as a philosophy that holds the middle ground between two extreme poles, materialism on the one hand and phenomenology on the other, by means of his theory of “multiple relations [müteaddit izafetler] and correspondence [tevâfuk]” (Ülken 1936, 189). Unlike by Saffet, Russell’s criticism of naturalism and evolutionism is understood as the very condition of his own philosophy, which is based on a conception of “immutable logical frameworks” (mantıkî kadroların değişmezliği). Ülken therefore sees in this conception of pure logic the resurgence of a form of “Platonist rationalism” (Eflâtuncu rasyonalizm) (Ülken 1936, 189). On this point, Ülken echoes a judgement made by Kremer in his neo-Thomist criticism, without explicitly taking on the negative charge: “Analytical realism is a paradoxical resurrection of a naive Platonism that has no doubts whatsoever about the conformity of the mind with reality” (Kremer 1928b, 142).³⁶ Ülken rather affirms, in spite of this Platonist interpretation, that the divide remains complete between, on the one hand, the various metaphysical systems that have in common their concern with “lived reality” and “the whole of the vital being, including the body”, and, on the other hand, the abstract “theory of knowledge” (bilgi nazariyesi) that dominates in contemporary “philosophy of science” (ilim felsefesi), whether as a “mathematism” (matematizm) or as a “physicalism” (fizikalizm) (Ülken 1936, 190).

6 Conclusion

This paper traced the reception of Russell’s philosophy of science in 1930s Turkey, situating it in its institutional, ideological and theoretical context. This reception was initially part of an ideological scientistic framework, aimed at serving the educational and societal reforms implemented in Turkey from the late 1920s onwards. The major stake was to extend the paradigm of modern science to society, through the constitution of the social sciences. In this context, the reception of Russell’s scientific philosophy in the starting of the Republican era primarily consisted as an answer to the double need of reforming the system of national education, and of developing a new Turkish philosophical terminology through translation. However, this reception was diverse, both in terms of the themes addressed and the interpretative frameworks. Largely based on an appropriative reading of popular texts and/or secondary sources, this rather eclectic reception has been mediated, on the one hand, by American pragmatism, and, on the other, by logical empiricism through its reception in French-speaking sources, including neo-scholastic insights against logicism and its rejection of metaphysics. The second strand of this mediation was essentially carried out through French-speaking sources outside France, a country in which the growing interest in scientific philosophy in the 1930s did not involve any significant reception of Russell’s philosophical works. Finally, the keen interest in Russell has not been the occasion to inaugurate an analytical style in the practice of university philosophy in Turkey, and the important contributions to establishing a philosophical terminology in Turkish have not been pursued in a unified direction. The revival of interest in Russell’s analytic philosophy in Turkey from the 1960s onwards appears therefore to be independent of this early reception, except of Ülken’s textbooks which, because of their nature, have not been considered to be in the field of analytic philosophy.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the editors of this series, Sébastien Gandon and Ties van Gemert, as well as Jawdath Jabbour, for their reading of earlier versions of this article and their valuable comments and suggestions.