JOURNAL OF EDUCATIONAL AND INSTRUCTIONAL STUDIES IN THE WORLD February 2014, Volume: 4 Issue: 1 Article: 10 ISSN: 2146-7463 Copyright © International Journal on New Trends in Education and Their Implications / www.ijonte.org 80 AN EVALUATION OF THE CONCEPTS AND PROBLEMS OF PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION IN TERMS OF TEACHING RELIGION: A STUDY INTO THE UNITS OF PHILOSOPHY OF RELIGION AND RELIGIOUS CONCEPTS IN THE PROGRAMS OF TEACHING PHILOSOPHY Assist. Prof. Dr. Aytekin Demircioğlu Sinop University Faculty of Divinity Department of Phiolophy and Religious Sciences Sinop, TURKEY demircioglu.aytekin@gmail.com Abstract Teaching religion has often been considered from a problematic point of view in terms of our educational system. Carried out in a quite successful way through endowments (waqfs) in the rise of Ottoman period, religious education started to lose its success systematically with the period of regression Ottoman Empire. With the declaration of republic and the law of unification of education, it is not likely to say that religious education within the control of the state achieved the desired success. Religious education had its share from the approach of rejectionist attitude of the young regime which inherited almost all heritage of Ottoman and was not able to have an access to teaching programs in an independent way for a long time. The unit of the philosophy of religion and religious concepts were not given a place in the programs of teaching philosophy for a long time. In the current study, the units of the philosophy of religion and religious concepts in seven teaching programs of philosophy prepared in the period of republic were investigated. Key Words: Philosophy, religious, philosophy of religion, teaching program. INTRODUCTION The introduction of Islam to Turks was in the eras when Islamic culture and civilization was in a magnificent rise. This era of rise comprised the translation movements, which was one of the components that increased the accumulation of knowledge in Islamic world such that a great many works were translated into Arabic from various languages in the world, in particular from Latin. These works, which had mostly a scientific and philosophic content, attracted the interest of Muslims and Turks who had just initiated Islam. Therefore, philosophic subjects were given under such courses, particularly the ones like Kalam in the programs of Seljuk Madrasahs even if it did not take its place in an independent discipline. Besides that, no courses of philosophy were encountered in the teaching programs of Nizamiyah Madrasahs. However, it did not last longer. It was not regarded as a good approach for some people to teach philosophy at madrasahs the basic objective of which was to teach fiqh and other religious sciences and the courses of philosophy were taken out of the teaching programs of Nizamiyah Madrasahs (Kafadar: 1994: 279). However, taking philosophy courses out of teaching programs was not a real cut out, since philosophical discussions were carried out in the courses of Kalam from that time on; but philosophy was criticised by such scholars as Ghazali in these arguments. There were some similar cases in terms of Ottoman Madrasahs. In the rising period of Ottoman, it was possible to see philosophy courses in the programs of madrasahs, particularly in the reign of Fatih Sultan Mehmed. However, the interest in philosophy gradually decreased from that time on and philosophy losts its place in teaching programs. The Second Constitutionalism had a turning point in the history of Ottoman in terms of the course of philosophy; since Emrullah Efendi and Şükrü Bey, who were the ministers of the period, included the course of philosophy in the programs of Sultanis in this era. It was followed by such positive improvements as introducing the courses of philosophy to Darü’l – Fünun and writing of the first philosophy course book by Rıza Tevfik in 1910 (Kaynardağ, 2002: 85). From that time onwards, the course of philosophy has taken its place in the teaching programs without interruption.