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Aristotle on Dialectic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

D. W. Hamlyn
D. W. Hamlyn
Affiliation:
Birkbeck College, London
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Extract

There have in recent years been at least two important attempts to get to grips with Aristotle's conception of dialectic. I have in mind those by Martha C. Nussbaum in ‘Saving Aristotle's appearances’, which is chapter 8 of her The Fragility of Goodness, and by Terence H. Irwin in his important, though in my opinion somewhat misguided, book Aristotle's First Principles. There is a sense in which both of these writers are reacting to the work of G. E. L. Owen on cognate matters, particularly his well-known paper ‘Tithenai ta phainomena’. Owen himself was in part reacting to what I suppose is the traditional view of how Aristotle regarded dialectic, as revealed in Topics I. 1. On that view dialectic is for Aristotle a lesser way of proceeding than is demonstration, the method of science. For demonstration proceeds from premises which are accepted as true in themselves (that is to say that they are essentially and thus in some sense necessarily true) and moves from them to conclusions which follow necessarily from those premises; and the middle term of such a demonstrative syllogism then provides the ‘reason why’ for the truth of the conclusion. Dialectic proceeds from premises which are accepted on a lesser basis ‘by everyone or by the majority or by the wise, i.e. by all, or by the majority, or by the most notable and reputable of them’ (Topics I.1, 100b21–3), and proceeds deductively from them to further conclusions.

Type
Research Article
Information
Philosophy , Volume 65 , Issue 254 , October 1990 , pp. 465 - 476
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1990

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References

1 Cambridge University Press, 1986.

2 Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1988.

3 Originally in Mansion, S. (ed.), Aristote et les problèmes de méthode (Louvain: Symposium Aristotelicum, 1961), 83–103Google Scholar, and reprinted in Moravcsik, J. M. E. (ed.), Aristotle (New York: Doubleday, 1967), 167–190CrossRefGoogle Scholar and in Barnes, Jonathan, Schofield, Malcolm and Sorabji, Richard (eds), Articles on Aristotle, Vol. 1, 113–126.Google Scholar

4 In Bambrough, Renford (ed.), New Essays on Plato and Aristotle (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1965).Google Scholar

5 In my ‘Aristotelian Epagoge’, Phronesis XXI, 1976, 167–184.Google Scholar

6 See, for example, my ‘Aristotle: Standards, not Criteria’ in The Criterion of Truth, eds Huby, Pamela and Neal, Gordon (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 1989), 93–106.Google Scholar

7 Cambridge University Press, 1981.

8 See my ‘Aristotle: Standards, not Criteria’, 99ff.Google Scholar

9 In Idealism Past and Present, Royal Institute of Philosophy Lectures 13, ed. Vesey, G. N. A. (Cambridge University Press, 1982), 19–50.Google Scholar

10 In Aristotle on Science: The ‘Posterior Analytics’, Studia Aristotelica 9, ed. Berti, E. (Padova: Antenore, 1981), 97–139.Google Scholar

11 See again my ‘Aristotelian Epagoge’.

12 Phronesis 14, 1969, 123–152Google Scholar (reprinted in revised form in Articles on Aristotle, Vol. I, eds Barnes, Jonathan, Schofield, Malcolm and Sorabji, Richard (London: Duckworth, 1975), 65–87.Google Scholar

13 Cf. the ‘something suitable’ of Phaedo 101e1.

14 Cf. Republic VI and VII's account of dialectic vis-à-vis the more limited account of the argument in the passages of the Phaedo already noted.

15 Since the writing of this paper I have read with profit Kal, Victor's On Intuition and Discursive Reasoning in Aristotle (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1988)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. There is some agreement between what he says in Part I of that book about Aristotle's view of intuition and what I have to say here—although there are differences too.