The university reform of 1933 had established philosophy's institutional ground in Turkey: chairs were created, exiled academics from Germany taught, translation programmes began. The question for the next generation was built on that ground — what relation should hold between a transmitted philosophy and the society one actually lives in?

Hilmi Ziya Ülken answered through history and sociology. His studies of the transmission of Islamic thought to the West, of intellectual history from the Ottoman era to the republic, and of the formation of modern thought in Turkey — above all his History of Contemporary Thought in Turkey, completed in 1966 — showed that a philosophical tradition consists not only of texts but of institutions, journals and arguments. For Ülken the issue was not to choose between East and West but to understand how transmission works; his research into what Islamic philosophy gave to European scholasticism belongs to that view.

Nurettin Topçu, working from the thesis on an ethics of rebellion he wrote at the Sorbonne under Maurice Blondel, built a position centred on will and moral action. For him philosophy is not an order of knowledge but the human effort at self-transcendence; he tied the Sufi tradition of Anatolia into that framework and influenced a wide circle through his journal Hareket. Ülken's analytical and historical approach and Topçu's moral and spiritual one formed the two main strands of philosophy in Turkey in the decades that followed.

This generation's lasting contribution was to turn philosophy from an activity of translation into a way of asking questions. Philosophy departments in Turkey today teach both the analytic and the continental traditions, and the sociology journal Ülken founded continues as one of the oldest academic periodicals published in the country since 1940.