This paper aims to contextualize the eighteenth-century Ottoman scholar Meḥmed Aḳkirmānī’s (d. 1760) İklīlü’t-terācim, an annotated Turkish translation of Qāḍī Mīr al-Maybudī’s (d. 1504) commentary on Athīr al-Dīn al-Abharī’s (d. 1265) Hidāyat al-ḥikma. A thirteenth-century handbook of philosophy with chapters on logic, natural philosophy, and metaphysics, Abharī’s Hidāyat al-ḥikma was a tremendously popular work in later centuries throughout the Turco-Persianate world, eliciting numerous commentaries, glosses, and super-glosses. In the Ottoman Empire, especially from the seventeenth century onward, by far the most widely-read commentary on Abharī’s handbook was that of Maybudī, covering the chapters on natural philosophy and metaphysics. His commentary on the chapter on natural philosophy, in particular, attracted considerable interest in Ottoman scholarly circles and was studied intensively, usually with the gloss of Muṣliḥ al-Dīn al-Lārī (d. 1571) on this part. By the mid-eighteenth century, Maybudī’s commentary had a large enough readership in the Empire to warrant an extensively annotated translation into Turkish by Meḥmed Aḳkirmānī, which he dedicated to an Ottoman provincial notable. This paper first situates Aḳkirmānī’s translation within its socio-cultural context and argues that it embodies the convergence of philosophy with two early modern currents in the Ottoman Empire: the increasing vernacularization of scientific discourse and the growing patronage of scholarship by provincial elites. Next, the paper explores the intellectual context of the natural philosophy chapter of Aḳkirmānī’s translation, highlighting the main controversies in this part, identifying the intertextual references, and discussing Aḳkirmānī’s critical engagement with his sources. Ultimately, the paper challenges both the still lingering view of philosophy as a peripheral activity in the early modern Ottoman Empire and the more recently proposed claim of natural philosophy being notably absent during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries.