
This was the universal dialectic of motion and rest. The philosophers of early Greek classicism spoke about universal and eternal motion and at the same time imagined the cosmos in the form of a completed and perfect entirety, something eternal and at rest. The ancient dialectic, based on a living, sensory perception of the material world, beginning with the very first conceptions of Greek philosophy, formulated an understanding of reality as something that changes and becomes, combining opposites within itself. Ancient eastern and Graeco-Roman philosophy created everlasting patterns for the dialectical world view. In the philosophy of Marxism-Leninism, the unity of materialism and dialectic has received a scientific basis and a logically consistent expression.ĭialectical thought has very ancient origins.

In the history of dialectic, the following principal stages can be clearly distinguished: the spontaneous, naive dialectic of the ancient thinkers the dialectic of the Renaissance philosophers the idealistic dialectic of German classical philosophy the dialectic of the 19th-century Russian revolutionary democrats and the Marxist-Leninist materialist dialectic as the highest form of modern dialectic.
Inventor of dialectic free#
Lenin, dialectic is a doctrine of development in its most complete and profound form, free from one-sidedness a doctrine concerning the relativity of human knowledge (which provides us with a reflection of eternally developing matter). In this sense dialectic, beginning with Hegel, is contrasted with metaphysics-the mode of thought that considers things and phenomena as unchanging and independent of each other. (also, dialectics), the doctrine of the most general principles of emergence and development, whose internal source is viewed as the unity of and conflict between opposites. in the work of the FRANKFURT SCHOOL OF CRITICAL THEORY. The notion of the dialectic in this latter sense lives on, however, in more open-ended conceptions of NEGATION AND NEGATIVITY, e.g. However, the interpretation of the dialectic as involving ‘dialectical laws of nature’ is usually regarded as a wrong interpretation: the opposite of a focus on the emergence of novelty. Hegel's approach was taken up in MARXISM and in DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM. It was KANT and HEGEL, however, who first proposed the alternative of a fullyfledged dialectical logic, in which metaphysical and, for Hegel, the real world is ‘Catholic’ in its own self-understanding of what it wishes to reject, and its shape is in part fixed in that contradictions are surmounted in the course of ‘world-history’, realizing a more unified ‘truth’ – e.g.

In the 18th- and 19th-centuries, the attempt to establish inductive logic (see INDUCTION AND INDUCTIVE LOGIC) was another attempt to escape the formalism of conventional deductive logic.

Socrates proceeded by a method of recurrent questioning of his interlocuters, multiplying their uncertainties, and enlarging their grasp by encouraging them to shift ground. However, ever since SOCRATES, thinkers have wanted to capture more of the reality of creative arguments, in which the conclusions reached involve genuine novelties. (in German Idealist philosophy and in MARXISM) the process of contradiction and resolution – involving, or analogous to, the process of assertion, contradiction and agreement in an argument – in which conceptual and/or real world contradictions are resolved.įormal logic licenses arguments, from given premises to conclusions according to strict rules, in which the conclusions are contained in the initial premises.originally a term which simply meant LOGIC and/or METAPHYSICS (Williams, 1976).The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia™ Copyright © 2022, Columbia University Press.
