Speaker: Ayhan Çitil
Immanuel Kant, who was perhaps the greatest influence on the last two centuries of philosophy with his ideas, played a decisive role in overcoming the crisis that was being experienced in his time, and had laid the foundations that has caused the emergence of the crises after him. In his three books that constitutes the backbone of his project of critique, Kant had proposed drawing different boundaries to knowledge, and through these boundaries he had provided a significant contribution to the development of the sciences. The acceptance of these boundaries has, at least for some time, taken certain questions out of the realm of academic interest, questions that deserve to be defined by the adjective of metaphysical, and which, humanity (the human mind) could not help but ask. After the developments in logic and basic sciences subsequent to Kant, today it is possible to observe an unexpected revisiting of these questions. The fact that the ways of thinking that have developed due to neglecting and abandoning these aforementioned questions have been addressing these questions anew has led contemporary philosophy into a deep intellectual crisis. The talk aims to address and critically evaluate the nature of this crisis and the philosophers' pursuit of coming up with a resolution to this crisis.
Ahmet Ayhan Çitil completed a double major at the departments of Industrial Engineering and Economics at Boğaziçi University in 1991. At the same university, he received his master's degree in 1994, with a dissertation titled An Introduction to the Ontological Foundations of Gödel's Incompleteness Theorems, and in 2000, he received his philosophical doctorate degree with a thesis titled The Theory of Object in Kant's Transcendental Thought and Some Consequences of a Deepening of This Theory. Çitil's academic work focuses on the fields of logic, philosophy of mathematics and ontology on the one hand, and on moral philosophy on the other. Çitil has published some of his work on the project of developing an object-oriented mathematical philosophy in the form of a book titled Matematik ve Metafizik, Birinci Kitap: Sayı ve Nesne [Mathematics and Metaphysics, Book One: Number and Object] (2012). He pursues his work in the field of moral philosophy around the question of "Is it possible to demonstrate that there are objective boundaries in terms of morals, for us actors who exist in a historical space?"
Events are free of charge. Invitations can be obtained, on the day of the event, one hour prior to the event, at the Akbank Sanat ticket counter.