Since the foundation of our Republic, many translated works that convey the global views, concepts, beliefs, thought, movements and facts that have shaped the Western mentality have been published, but due to the structural characteristics of our publishing industry, it has not been possible for the Turkish readers to have a chronological and complete selection of Western intellectual history. The translation mobilization between 1940 and 1946 has been the most comprehensive initiative in this field; however, almost all 496 works translated into Turkish were literary classics, and the works of some philosophers, which were translated to meet the need for philosophy textbooks, have remained as eclectic knowledge repositories, as their place in the developmental process of the Western mentality is not showed and they were not supported by other works that were the source of the past and the future of their ideas. This situation, on the one hand, has led to the conclusion that Turkish readers cannot read the Western mentality correctly, and on the other hand, it does not allow the reader to make a sound assessment of his historical existence and position.
The selection of Texts Guiding the West introduced the texts, which are considered to be the core of the ideas of 325 thinkers who have defined the Western mentality, into contemporary Turkish in today’s world where relations between civilizations have gained vital dimensions, and presented the basic ideas of the Western mentality, which sees its origins in Jewish-Christian and Greek-Roman civilizations in a spectrum extending from Prophet Isaac to Arthur M.Schlensinger Jr., and from St.Thomas Aquinas to Arnold Toynbee.
