Ibn Haldun University Department of Philosophy faculty member Dr. Rıza Tevfik Kalyoncu's doctoral dissertation was published under the title “Competence and Meaning: The Structure of Kalam in terms of Farabi”. The work, which deals with Farabi's philosophical system as a whole and reveals his evaluations on Kalam in this respect, met with the readers through Ibn Haldun University Publications.
The main purpose of this work, entitled Competence and Meaning: The Structure of Kalām in terms of al-Fârâbî, is to find and explain the intellectual consistency between al-Fārābī's thoughts and the main theories that form the basis of his different ideas, and to understand his views on kalām within this consistency. The study of al-Fārābī's philosophy within its own coherence has been a focus of recent studies on al-Fârâbî. This study should be considered within this recent trend in the literature on al-Fârâbî's philosophy.
In this respect, this work attempts to analyze al-Farabi’s philosophy as a system and to analyze the role attributed to Kalam in this system. For this purpose, the phenomenological method was applied in the study. What is meant by phenomenology here is to understand al-Farabi's philosophy as it manifests itself. Therefore, the point of this research is to derive the theoretical framework from al-Farabi's philosophy itself. By clarifying this point to a certain extent, it is aimed both to understand al-Farabi's philosophy and to contribute to philosophical studies in terms of methodology. For this purpose, al-Farabi studies in English and Turkish literature have been largely reviewed, and different approaches to al-Farabi's philosophy, opinions and ideas on how al-Farabi should be understood have been taken into consideration.
