Cusanus’ta İkinci Tanrı Olarak İnsan ve Ölçme Edimi
Man as the Second God and the Act of Measurement in Cusanus

Summary/Abstract: Nicolaus Cusanus, considered one of the most important German thinkers by many historians of philosophy, has yet to receive the recognition he deserves in the philosophical circles in Turkey. However, the philosophical writings of Cusanus contain the seeds of the thoughts of many modern philosophers such as Descartes, Berkeley, Leibniz, Kant, and Hegel. For this reason, studies on Cusanus are an essential stopping point in the history of philosophy, especially for the Renaissance period and the transition to modern philosophy. Despite this, texts examining Cusanus' thoughts are limited in foreign languages and Turkish. Towards the end of the 19th century, studies on Cusanus started and recently the worldwide interest in Cusanus has increased. Although there are different theses about the original aspect of Cusanus’ thoughts in these sources, his theory of knowledge and the rela-tionship of this theory with the contemporary subject of philosophy of subjectivity attract attention. The reason for this is that Cusanus, unlike his contemporaries, as a result of his views on the human mind, makes the human center in the act of knowing and puts everything else into the mind's mediation. That is why people can know things not as they are in themselves, but only in so far, they are part of the conceptual world, that their own mind constructs that. This is a system of thought that on the one hand puts the human mind at the center through its act of knowing on the other hand, limits its knowledge. This centrality of the human mind led Cusanus to characterize man as the second god on earth. The main reason for characterizing man as the second god is the activity of knowing and the act of measuring that lies at the core of this activity. Despite its significance, there is no study focusing on man’s creativity in this world through the relationship between Cusanus’s conception of man as the second god and the human mind’s activity of measurement, which reveals the originality of Cusanus’ thought. This study aims to fill this gap in the literature. To achieve this aim, this study examines the act of measurement of man as the second god, which reveals the originality of Cusanus’ theory of knowledge associated with modern and contemporary philosophy.

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