Unlike them, he professed to be seeking the truth. Socrates stands in contrast to the Sophists. If, however, the lost work of Protagoras did begin, as several subsequent writers attest, with the claim that on every subject two opposite statements ( О» ПЊ Оі Ої О№ ) could be made, and if the book continued with a content of statement and counterstatement, then Protagoras deserves to be considered the ancestor of the medieval or of the Hegelian dialectic rather than the father of eristic. Aristotle, too, thought the Sophists worth answering in his book De Sophisticis Elenchis (Sophistical refutations), although he sharply distinguished eristic from dialectic, dialectic being for him a respectable activity. Eristic came to make deliberate use of invalid argumentation and sophistical tricks, and these were ridiculed by Plato in his dialogue Euthydemus, which takes its name from an actual Sophist who appears in it as a user of eristic arguments. This degenerate form of dialectic was named 'eristic' by Plato (for example, in Sophist 231e) and others, from the word бј” ПЃ О№ П‚ (strife).

For example, the Sophist Protagoras claimed that he could 'make the worse argument appear the better' such an aim belongs rather to rhetoric than to logic or philosophy. Insofar as this method relies on the law of formal logic known as modus tollens (if p implies q, and q is false, then p is false), Zeno was a pioneer of logic, but there is no evidence that he could formulate the law itself it was left to Aristotle later to state explicitly the principles that underlie this kind of dialectic, and thus to create the science of formal logic.Дialectic as the use of such indirect logical arguments to defeat an opponent seems to have been used by Zeno for serious philosophical purposes, but it later became, in the hands of the Sophists, a mere instrument for winning a dispute. For example, it is unacceptable that Achilles never overtakes the tortoise therefore, the hypothesis that leads to this conclusion must be rejected. Aristotle presumably had Zeno's paradoxes in mind, as they are outstanding examples of dialectic, in the sense of refutation of the hypotheses of opponents by drawing unacceptable consequences from those hypotheses. Socrates and his PredecessorsДialectic perhaps originated in the fifth century BCE, since Zeno of Elea, the author of the famous paradoxes, was recognized by Aristotle as its inventor (Diogenes La Г«rtius, Lives VIII, 57). In the following discussion the different kinds of dialectic will be elucidated in their historical order. Meaning (2) is notably still current, and the term is often used in a pejorative sense. However, among the more important meanings of the term have been (1) the method of refutation by examining logical consequences, (2) sophistical reasoning, (3) the method of division or repeated logical analysis of genera into species, (4) an investigation of the supremely general abstract notions by some process of reasoning leading up to them from particular cases or hypotheses, (5) logical reasoning or debate using premises that are merely probable or generally accepted, (6) formal logic, (7) the criticism of the logic of illusion, showing the contradictions into which reason falls in trying to go beyond experience to deal with transcendental objects, and (8) the logical development of thought or reality through thesis and antithesis to a synthesis of these opposites. So far as its great variety of meanings have anything in common, it is perhaps that dialectic is a method of seeking and sometimes arriving at the truth by reasoning, but even this general description, which to fit the variety of cases is so vague as to be valueless, fails to do justice to the Hegelian and Marxist notion of dialectic as a historical process. The term dialectic originates in the Greek expression for the art of conversation ( Оґ О№ О± О» Оµ Оє П„ О№ Оє бЅґ П„ О П‡ ОЅ О· ).

Hegelian dialectic definition