The Turkish market of Qur'an translations and studies is exceedingly oversaturated. Critics find some of these lacking in proper hermeneutical judgement, impelling them to reflect on the conditions of judicious Qur'anic exegesis. These reflections have remained relatively unexplored in English academic literature. In Critical Hermeneutics, Celik explores and compares the hermeneutical philosophies of three Turkish intellectuals, namely Alpyagil, Cündioglu, and Öztürk. By exploring their philosophical views on subjectivity and objectivity in the context of interpreting the Qur'an, Celik draws major implications (...) for reading the Qur'an in new and different ways. (shrink)

About Antiquities: Politics of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire. By Zeynep Çelik. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2016. Pp. xi + 268, illus. $27.95.

Scramble for the Past: A Story of Archaeology in the Ottoman Empire, 1753–1914. Edited by Zainab Bahrani, Zeynep Çelik, and Edhem Eldem. Istanbul: SALT, 2011. Pp. 520, illus. TRL 80, $41.60.

In The Birth of Reason Louis Dudek establishes the link between ancient pre-Socratic Atomism and modern quantum mechanics. In characteristically unencumbered terms, Dudek shows how this revolutionary philosophy, the invention of thinkers from Ioanian Greek trading cities, has been consistently misrepresented and resisted. Atomism nevertheless marks the transition from primitive mythological thinking (mythos) to the abstract, concept-based rationality (logos) that informs our modern approach to an ultimately unknowable reality. This essay ìis a kind of summation of myself ó gnothi seautÛn.... (...) I am neither a materialist nor a theist, really, nor am I altogether an agnostic. As I say in [the] essay, ëthe ultimate reality is unknowable,í but I am sure that if it were knowable it would satisfy both the materialist and the theist, and much more that we cannot imagine.î Identified by Wynne Francis as Canadaís first ìman of letters,î Dudek once again ventures into new intellectual territory ó and reveals the underpinnings of his own remarkable cultural, social, and economic thought. Critical Comment ìIf anyone could make the Ionian skeptics palatable to a generation raised on music and television, itís Louis Dudek.î ó The Ottawa Citizen ì...the highlight is ... 39 fragments from the pre-Socratics that Dudek astutely describes as reading ëlike a philosophical poem.íî ó The Montreal Gazette ì...includes the thesis that the scientific conception of the universe ... is the most advanced stage of religious evolution.î ó Canadian Book Review Annual. (shrink)