Enlightenment texts, particularly those authored by Fénelon and Voltaire, served as a common foundation for the modernizing literatures of the Ottoman Empire. Starting from the early decades of the nineteenth century, in order to accelerate the process of modernization, Arab, Armenian, Greek, and Turkish translators in the empire favored translating the primary texts of Enlightenment into their own languages. Before the end of the 1850s, Enlightenment works such as Fénelon’s The Adventures of Telemachus and Voltaire’s Zadig, and Micromégas had been translated into non-Turkish languages within the empire. Although all these literatures had idiosyncratic features, there was a common trend of translating literary works with philosophical backgrounds throughout the modernization period. Ottoman Turkish translators followed this trend, and particularly those who were sent to Europe to attain Western-style education translated the major works of Enlightenment upon their return to the empire. In this respect, 1859 was the year that the first translation attempts from European languages into Ottoman Turkish yielded results. Three pioneering figures of the time, Yusuf Kamil, İbrahim Şinasi, and Münif Mehmed shared similar translation preferences and successively published works of Enlightenment. This paper proposes examining Enlightenment translations made into Ottoman Turkish that were often associated with the term “hikmet”, which refers to wisdom and was interchangeably used for “philosophy”. Accordingly, this study analyzes Terceme-i Telemak (1862, translated in 1859), which was recognized as a “book of wisdom” (kitab-ı hikmet-nisab), Muhaverat-ı Hikemiyye (1859), a compilation of philosophical dialogues from Enlightenment philosophers, and Micromégas, which was titled a “philosophical story” (hikâye-i hikemiyye) and was retranslated for different purposes. Since “hikmet” was a term with religious connotations used in Sufi doctrine, and recognized as an esoteric form of knowledge, the association of the term with Enlightenment texts led to criticism regarding the mystification of Enlightenment thought. Concerning these critiques, this paper argues that the meaning of “hikmet” underwent a transformation, becoming a term referring to universal truth, and being secularized to facilitate the dissemination of Enlightenment philosophy within the empire. Therefore, this study focuses on the networks of Enlightenment texts in the Ottoman Empire and aims to examine the reasons behind their correlation with existing concepts such as “hikmet”.