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  Is Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) completely Innocent? Prof. Dr. Ali Gunes Ibn Haldun University Comparative Literature Department Email:  ali.gunes@ihu.edu.tr     Last weekend, my daughter visited me. She is a lecturer who teaches English and is also a doctoral (PhD) candidate. She has just started her courses. I watched her struggle with her assignments and the articles she had to submit to her professors. Suddenly, I said to her: “Why don't you use AI platforms to write your articles quickly rather than boiling your mind to get ideas from many articles lying in front of you? Everybody is using them, so why do you waste your time and drain your energy?” She raised her head and stared straight into my eyes at that moment. “Father! Father!” she said. “Is it you who tell me such things?” she continued.  I insisted on saying: “What is wrong with it? Everybody is using it -  professors, undergraduate students, graduate students, writers, journalists...
  BOOK REVIEW     ·     ISLAMIC HISTORY & CIVILISATION   The Forgotten Architects of Modernity: How nine centuries of Islamic scholarship built the foundations Europe claims as its own   BOOK:  How Islam Created the Modern World    ·  Mark Graham  ·  Amana Publications, 2006  ·  199 pp. Reviewed by Ali Gunes  |  Chair of the Comparative Literature Department, Ibn Haldun University, Istanbul If one opens any standard Western textbook on the history of science, one will get the same story: the ancient Greeks laid the foundations; Europe then slept through centuries of intellectual stagnation; and finally, in fifteenth-century Italy, the Renaissance arrived, kicked off the Scientific Revolution and produced the world we recognise today. It is told with great confidence, though it is wrong in its most consequential details. Mark Graham’s  How Islam Created the Mod...
  Ibn Haldun University: Reclaiming the Epistemic Commons  for  Social  Science and  Human Flourishing Prof. Dr. Ali Gunes Ibn Haldun University Department of Comparative Literature Email:  ali.gunes@ihu.edu.tr   Something has quietly gone wrong at universities around the world. Governments, funding agencies, and corporate partners have spent decades pushing institutions towards Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics (STEM) disciplines and applied professional programmes, treating them as the surest route to economic productivity. The social sciences, meanwhile, have been pushed to the margins, stripped of prestige and resources. This is not merely a quarrel over departmental budgets. The capacity of contemporary societies to make sense of their most pressing problems -- whether climate change, structural unemployment, mass migration, or political polarisation -- depends on the analytical traditions cultivated by sociology, anthropology, his...
  Rooted in tradition, reaching for the world:   How Ibn Haldun University is rethinking what a social sciences education can be. Prof. Dr. Ali Gunes İbn Haldun University  Department of Comparative Literature. Email :  ali.gunes@ihu.edu.tr     Establishing a university named after Ibn Khaldun requires strong courage and vision. Ibn Khaldun, a 14th-century scholar from Tunisia, is widely regarded as one of the earliest true social scientists in human history, someone who discussed the rise and fall of civilisations centuries before sociology, economics, and political science had names. His well-known book is the  Muqaddimah  (completed in 1377), or  Prolegomena  (Introduction), which has inspired and influenced scholars, philosophers, sociologists, and historians worldwide. For example, 17th- and 19 th -century Ottoman historians such as Katip Celebi, Mustafa Naima, and Ahmet Cevdet Pasha employed Ibn Khaldun’s theory to examine the rise...
  Bilgin in  Farklılaşması ve Kurumsal Misyon: Araştırma ve Öğretim (Teaching) Üniversitelerinin Karşılaştırmalı Analizi Ali Güneş gunesali1@gmail.com   Geçtiğimiz günlerde bir arkadaşın oğlunun sünnet merasimine katıldım. Oturduğum masada  birkaç arkadaşımla sohbet ediyordum.  Arkamdan birisi omuzuma dokundu ve hocam “Merhaba” dedi. Ben de “merhaba” dedim.  Devamında “Sizin isminizi duydum; ismim X. Yenice doçent oldum,” dedi. Ben de “Hayırlı olsun. İnşallah en kısa zamanda profesör olmakta nasip olur, hocam,” dedim. Hoca durmadı: “Bu unvan benim için önemliydi. Üniversitemiz bir araştırma üniversitesi. Yeni unvanım üniversitemizin araştırma çabalarına çok büyük katkı sağlayacak,” dedi. Ben de “muhakkak, hocam,” dedim. Sonrasında kendi kendime, “Bir akademisyen, yeni tanıştığı kişiye sorulmadan yeni unvanından neden bahseder?” diye düşündüm. Açıkçası, “biraz da garibe gitti.”   Anladım, ülkemizde çoğu zaman gelenek ve kültüre dayalı olarak k...