Common sense, reason, reality, memory, understanding, morality, justice, nature, freedom, law, and human rights are the primary areas of philosophy. Science, which searches for methods on correct thinking, is on its way towards reaching the truth thanks to these areas of philosophy. Positive results, gains and acquisitions are achieved on the bright paths opened by the effort to know the universe. And especially when the natural and social evolutions that humanity has gone through, bloody wars, revolutions, hunger, death, absence, deprivation, poverty, and corruption are considered, the value of humanity and justice finds its place automatically. The enlightenment of societies is undoubtedly focused on peace. In his work titled Philosophical Essay on Eternal Peace (2020), in which he developed the concept of just peace instead of the concept of just war, the famous German thinker Immanuel Kant took it as his duty to question how a world without war could be possible by addressing the theoretical, political and legal dimensions of the universally continuous and permanent ideal. Every person and all society face problems and challenges. It is necessary to reveal the principles and values that will ensure peace and that history, experience and theory will show on how to respond to these.
According to Alexis de Tocqueville (2016), in Democracy in America, progress in society should be seen as a by-product of human cooperation. Unless society becomes civilized, it will not be free. Civil society is a humane society in terms of its results. Another famous French thinker, Benjamin Constant, argued in Principes de Politique (1815), in which he advocated building new institutions according to the modern social structure, that the most important freedom of man, as an invention of the modern world, was the association of one person with another, rather than the freedom to participate in government. He emphasized the importance of self-sacrifice as the source of the individual's freedom and defended the philosophy that the emotional reality of the individual is the only basis for his freedom.
The dignity of humanity rises through rights and freedoms. Today, humanity's climate is undergoing positive change in the direction of unquestionably protecting these rights. The dignity of personality in its most original form can only be realized through these rights. For this reason, the modern order advances based on human rights by legalizing social relations according to the idea of rights and the sense of justice. Therefore, the criterion of appropriateness of morality must now be conditioned on the validity of justice.
Already in ancient times, Plato, in his Dialogues (2009), determined courage, wisdom, moderation and fairness as the correct behavioural characteristics of a person within the norms of behaviour. Today, intelligence, wisdom, moderation, and courage are the prerequisites for justice, therefore these virtues that give people power, energy and talent are the basic carriers of being human, but their real values emerge within the state and society. Here the virtue of justice is the unifier of the other three.
These virtues or values as a whole form the ideal picture of the moral person. The desire to achieve these lies in the nature and essence of man. Aristotle, with whom ancient Greek philosophy reached its peak, also considered justice to be the most perfect of all virtues in his Nicomachean Ethics (2014). According to him, the foundations of both state and family life lie in this virtue.
A free society, which today means having order, does not arise from telling people what to do, but from the fact that the evolving traditions and inherited institutions of human society allow individuals to pursue their own goals and thereby meet the needs of others. Therefore, order today is understood as social peace. The reason is that it allows people with different interests and values to live in society without resorting to fights, conflicts, or civil war. This is the meaning of the idea of order in the modern sense.
However, aside from what is happening especially in science, intellectual structures, technology and industry, the lack of ethical values in existing democracies has led to conflicts based on ethnicity, religious understanding, political and economic reasons in many parts of the world. It now is understood that these conflicts cannot be prevented by using pressure or force. It is understood that ethnic or national identity comes to the fore in these conflicts. In fact, what is tried to be protected under these identities are the values considered sacred, which are considered as the basic elements that shape these identities. And these values are surrounded by local cultural lives. This requires a focus and the presence of a qualified person, and a qualified person is a person who can think about others other than himself. Internal and external peace, both among people and among societies, can never be permanent unless it is built on the foundation of justice. Justice always remains relative unless it is based on human rights.
In this context, we have determined the themes of our journal for 2024 as follows, to be scrutinizing the socio-cultural, economic-political, and technological order / system that today's people are experiencing. We look forward to your contributions to the field with your work in these contents.
Deadline for article submission to the April issue: February 1, 2024
2024 April Issue Theme “Discourse and Reality”
2024 October Issue Theme “Social Memory”
Regards,
Editorial Board