Introduction

Note: I am deeply grateful to Professor Harold Tarrant for his comments and suggestions on the Introduction. Any errors and omissions in this section are my own responsibility.

1 Definitions and Conceptions of Dialectic

Dialectic, also called dialectics, διαλεκτική (sc. ἐπιστήμη or τέχνη), originally means “the art of conversation or debate or, most fundamentally, the process of reasoning to obtain truth and knowledge on any topic”.1 According to other definitions of dialectic, it is “the science of conducting a philosophical dialogue (διαλέγεσθαι, to converse) by exploring the consequences of premises asserted or conceded by an interlocutor”2 or “a method of philosophical argument that involves some sort of contradictory process between opposing ideas”.3

The term was originally used to denote a form of logical argumentation but was later used to also designate a philosophical concept of evolution applied to diverse fields, including thought, nature and history.4 For instance, in Kant, dialectic is the “logic of illusion” or the “logic of appearance” and it is the task of true philosophy “to reveal the places where reason transgresses its proper boundaries, producing the illusions of transcendental metaphysics”.5 In Hegel, dialectics “refers to the necessary process that makes up progress in both thought and the world” and “this process is one of overcoming the contradiction between thesis and antithesis, by means of synthesis; the synthesis in turn becomes contradicted, and the process repeats itself until final perfection is reached”.6 Karl Marx explained the change of social formations by invoking “dialectical relationships between productive forces and relations of production, between the basis and the superstructure”. Friedrich Engels, after criticizing the idealistic dialectics of Kant, Schelling and Hegel, set out to prove that “materialistic dialectics provides the philosophical foundations for a comprehensive theory of development”.7 The Marxian kind of dialectics provided the framework for philosophical and social inquiry from which emerged critical theory in the first half of the 20th century. This theory, represented by German philosophers and social scientists known as the Frankfurt school, applied the Marxian dialectic to criticize social phenomena arising from contradictions within the capitalist economy.8 Husserl and Heidegger established the foundations for a reformulation of dialectical inquiry within the frame of the phenomenological understanding of reality, and Gadamer inaugurated a new approach to dialectic entitled “philosophical hermeneutics”. The latter is a dialectical method to be used for the analysis of historical and literary texts but is broadly aimed towards the understanding of reality through a different perspective.9

2 The Origin of Dialectic, the Presocratics, and the Sophists

The authors of this volume are concerned with dialectic in its original meaning, focusing on dialectic as the process of reasoning and arguing to obtain truth and knowledge on any topic of philosophical inquiry. Both Plato and Aristotle associate Zeno of Elea with the beginnings of dialectic. The former, implicitly in his dialogue Parmenides, attributes to Zeno a method of argumentation which constitutes a kind of dialectic, while Aristotle explicitly considers the Eleatic Zeno as the inventor or discoverer of dialectic.10 In favor of this view, it can be said that Zeno practiced a kind of elenchus before the Socratic elenchus, following a procedure which consists in establishing a thesis by refuting the contradictory thesis. The refutation of a thesis was being implemented by trying to show that the thesis in question was leading to intrinsically contradictory consequences. For example, if things are many, then things would be both similar and dissimilar at the same time. This method implies the validity of the principle of non-contradiction.11 His antinomies derived contradictory consequences from a disputed hypothesis.12 According to one line of interpretation, Zeno was in general applying the reduction of a thesis to impossibility.13 So, his paradoxes of divisibility and movement would be better construed as simple derivations of impossibility (ἀδύνατον) than reductio ad absurdum.14

Ancient Greek dialectic has not only the narrow sense of a philosophical method that aims at establishing the foundations of knowledge or science based on the examination of the argumentation towards an interlocutor, it also has a significant concern for ontology, for principles or for beings, for ideas and forms.15 The latter concern of dialectic places the emphasis on the need for the investigation not only of the structure of an argument and the counter-argument, not only of the structure of a dialogue, of the structure of thought and its relation to discourse, and not only of the structure of soul or self and its understanding of reality, but finally also of the structure of cosmos as well.

Given that the major problems driving ancient philosophical thought were the questions whether the principles of things are one or many and whether there is one Being or many, one of the central issues of ancient Greek dialectic is the study of the relation between the one and the many.16 Heraclitus is a philosopher who places this problem in the center of his philosophy, by thematizing it in his theory of flux and his conception of the unity of opposites. A significant proportion of the preserved fragments of his work are devoted to the theory of identity and unity of the opposites. The examples he offers are presented as empirical proofs of the fundamental theoretical principle which, at the beginning of his treatise On Nature, recommends to humans “to know all things as one”.17 His theory of flux (for example, that one cannot step twice into the same river, for fresh water is ever flowing; and even when one steps into the same river, other and still other water will flow over one18) offers the foundations of the epistemology which, according to Aristotle, motivated the formation of the Platonic theory of Forms. No sense-perceptible thing can be grasped as the object of knowledge because it is constantly in flux. From this assumption emerges the epistemological postulate that true objects of knowledge must have features of ontological stability.19 Furthermore, in Heraclitus, the identity of a given river remains fixed although it is constantly changing. This idea alludes to the preservation of structure within a process of flux, and further to the contradistinction between a unitary form which is maintained and its material embodiment which is constantly lost and replaced.20 The idea that the opposites can co-exist in a unity, in the sense that they belong to the essence of a thing, can be construed as a foreshadowing of the Aristotelian theory of potentiality and theory of change. These theories presuppose “an ambivalence of essence” in the sense that a thing’s very being may require the coexistence within it of opposite potentialities.21

This ontological approach not only endows with new ramifications the debate between monism and pluralism, which is one aspect of the central and perennial problem of dialectic, namely the search for the relation between the one and the many, but it also has an impact on this aspect of dialectic which deals with the structure of argumentation and with every single argument when one speaks, not only about the principles of things, or the opposites and the procedures of change within nature and cosmos, but also simply regarding anthropocentric matters, and finally on any matter. The Parmenidean thesis that there is a constant interrelation between being, thinking and speaking along with his denial of ouk estin,22 namely the denial of negative statements about the nature or essence of things, provoke reactions that boost the development of dialectic and establish the foundations of the search for the use and function of the verb estin and its ontological significance.23 According to Furley, in the sentence πολύδηριν ἔλεγχον of Frg. 7, the original meaning of ἔλεγχος, “shame” or “disgrace”, had been replaced by that of “refutation”24. In an earlier period there had also been a neuter form of elenchos, τὸ ἔλεγχος, and a feminine noun, ἡ ἐλεγχείη, but their usage later declined.25 Lesher, who has researched the semantic history of this word, notes that there is no reason to doubt that 6th- and 7th-century writers used both the neuter noun and the verb form to convey the idea of shame and disgrace.26 He suggests that there is a literary use in the background of the word which shows that when a masculine form of elenchos appears, it is not surprising that its meaning is not “disgrace”, but a “test” or a “contest” in which one incurs or avoids disgrace.27 He further...