Bekir Harun Küçük
"Crossing Borders in Istanbul: Esad’s Circle and European Intellectual Life in the
Eighteenth Century"
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Abstract
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My project is a re-evaluation of the geography of intellectual and scientific modernity in the 18th century with an empirical focus on Yanyali Esad Efendi's (d. Istanbul, 1730) work on physics. While Esad, an Ottoman scholar, offered an original synthesis of Cartesian and Aristotelian natural philosophy, the most outstanding feature of his work was the formulation of a new genealogy of science. According to Esad, European and Arabic-Ottoman scientific traditions were one and the same. Esad's broad intellectual network, comprising of German, Eastern European and Islamic scholars, shaped his vision of a unified intellectual culture extending from Amsterdam to Isfahan. Based on the writings of Esad and his circle, my project interrogates the prevailing ideas about geographical and temporal boundaries of scientific cultures. I also attempt to compare the variety of political interests that informed scientific practices both in Europe and in the Ottoman Empire. Looking at the concrete connections between different intellectual movements in Eastern Europe and the Middle East, my project will evaluate the viability of the idea of scientific modernization as an analytic category in explaining the rise and expansion of European science.
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