Inan Ilhan, The Philosophy of Curiosity

Curiosity about Curiosity

Ilhan Inan’s (2012) approach to curiosity is based on the following central theses: (i) for every question asked out of curiosity there is a corresponding term (defi nite description) that is inostensible for the asker (its reference is unknown) and that has the function of uniquely identifying an object; (ii) the satisfaction of curiosity is always in the form of coming to know an object as fa...

Who is Professor İlhan Paşaoğlu?

İlhan Paşaoğlu was born in Kirkuk on August 23, 1950. After completing his primary, secondary and high school education there, he came to Istanbul in 1968. He enrolled in Istanbul University's Istanbul Faculty of Medicine in 1969 and graduated in 1974. In the same year, he began specialization education in the Department of Thoracic and Cardiovascular Surgery in the Faculty of Medicine at Hacet...

Curiosity, forbidden knowledge, and the reformation of natural philosophy in early modern England.

From the patristic period to the beginning of the seventeenth century curiosity was regarded as an intellectual vice. Curious individuals were considered to be proud and "puffed up," and the objects of their investigations were deemed illicit, dispute engendering, unknowable, or useless. Seventeenth-century projects for the advancement of learning had to distance themselves from curiosity and i...

Inan on Objectual and Propositional Ignorance

In this note, I would like to focus on the two central distinctions Inan draws between varieties of ignorance. One is the distinction between “objectual” and “propositional” ignorance, and the other is the distinction between “truth-ignorance” and “fact-ignorance,” which is a distinction between two types of propositional ignorance. According to Inan, appreciating these distinctions allow us to...

The Power of Curiosity