dialectic
idea · 5 works · 7 mentions · 11 anchored passages
dialectics · dialecticians · power of dialectic · reason · strong presumption · that art · the dialectical art · the dialecticians teach us · the very law which dialectics recites · this progress of thought
in the texts
On Moral Ends
The art of correct reasoning, classified by the Stoics as a virtue
And to those virtues of which we have argued they add also dialectic and physics, and both these they call by the name of virtue:
For the dialecticians teach us, as you know, that if the things which follow upon any matter are false, that very thing which they follow is false.
Republic
The highest section of the intelligible order, in which reason treats assumptions as hypotheses to rise to a first, unconditioned principle, then descends using only pure ideas.
Understand then, said I, that by the other section of the intelligible I mean that which the reason itself lays hold of by the power of dialectics, treating its assumptions not as absolute beginnings but literally as hypotheses, underpinnings, footings, and springboards so to speak, to enable it to rise to that which requires no assumption and is the starting-point of all, and after attaining to t …
Then, said I, “is not dialectics the only process of inquiry that advances in this manner, doing away with hypotheses, up to the first principle itself in order to find confirmation there?
In like manner, when anyone by dialectics attempts through discourse of reason and apart from all perceptions of sense to find his way to the very essence of each thing and does not desist till he apprehends by thought itself the nature of the good in itself, he arrives at the limit of the intelligible, as the other in our parable, came to the goal of the visible.
Lucullus
The logical art claimed by the Stoics to judge true and false propositions, shown here to be self-undermining via the sorites and the liar paradox.
You say that dialectic was invented as the arbiter, as it were, and judge of true and false.
That art, then, helps you nothing against the sorites, which teaches neither what, in increasing or diminishing, is first nor what is last.
which, having first advanced pleasantly, hands down the elements of speech and the understanding of ambiguities and the method of concluding, then, with a few things added, comes to the sorites, a slippery and dangerous place indeed — which you just now said was a faulty kind of questioning.
Stromata
The art of asking and answering, defended here as necessary for scriptural interpretation despite its sophistic misuse.
And the dialectic harped on in the schools is shown to be the philosopher's exercise about the probable, for the sake of the power of arguing against;
And how is it not useful to distinguish the ambiguous expressions and those uttered with the same name across the covenants?
" What, then, is the knowledge of answering?
al-Saʻādah fī falsafat al-akhlāq
The art of reasoning from well-known premises to strong presumption, with its own canons for questioning and answering, defined short of demonstration and above rhetoric.
As for that whose truth is greater than its falsity, it is that whose syllogisms are found from well-known things that are neither essential nor substantial to the thing sought and are not what constitutes it;
And he made fifth a book in which he mentioned the canons of the syllogisms taken from well-known matters, and how the questioning or the answering goes in this way, and in which he taught the canons by which this art is completed in the most excellent and most perfect way possible;
Along with that, if a man aims to be a strong dialectician, or an eloquent orator, or a poet who splits open his theme, he inclines towards what he seeks and acquires the book in which the canons of that art were composed, so as to become by them in the highest degree of it and the loftiest rank in it.