Dialectical Essays

  • Philosophy - The Dialectical Method

    1211 Words  | 3 Pages

    Philosophy - The Dialectical Method There are a lot many descriptions for the word dialectic. By viewing all of them what I have ended up concluding in the given context, i.e. Socrates’ Dialectical Method, is that: Dialectic is a variety of languages, conceivably a sort of a composition of the languages in this variety. The word comes from Ancient Greek dialektos, which is derived from dialegesthai, meaning to discourse, converse, and talk. By this root of the word, in this context, I deduce

  • Dialectical Journals- Things Fall Apart

    2594 Words  | 6 Pages

    Dialectical Journals 1. “His fame rested on solid personal achievements.” Pg. 3 paragraph 1 All fame begins when you do something noticeable. For example, actors and actresses build upon their careers and reputations by achieving excellence in their personal goals, as well as perfecting their public performance. 2. “…It was said that when he slept, his wives and children in his houses could hear him breathe.” Pg. 4 paragraph 1 One question that comes to mind when I read this is if he alternates

  • Wittgenstein's 1913 Objections To Russell's Theory of Belief: A Dialectical Reading

    2401 Words  | 5 Pages

    Objections To Russell's Theory of Belief: A Dialectical Reading ABSTRACT: In what follows, I give (following Burton Dreben) a dialectical reading of his dismissal of metaphysics and of Wittgenstein's objections to Russell in 1913. I argue that Wittgenstein must be read as advocating no particular theory or doctrine — that is, philosophy is an activity and not a body of truths. Furthermore, this insistence is thoroughgoing. Put differently, a dialectical reading must be applied to one's own thought

  • Plato's Dialectical Cut in Socrates' Soul in The Being of the Beautiful

    1158 Words  | 3 Pages

    Plato's Dialectical Cut in Socrates' Soul in The Being of the Beautiful Within the spectrum of the political realm, one of the most important philosophical questions arises, "What is the best regime?" It is obvious that the best regime is one of complied consent. There still seems to be difficulty in deciding the best means to the desired end. Politics, the ruling force, operates in the realm of opinions. Its counterpart, philosophy, is an attempt to replace opinions about political things

  • Aristotle's Reform of Paideia

    2992 Words  | 6 Pages

    Then I argue that Aristotle’s treatment of demonstrative and dialectical syllogisms provides rigorous standards for reasoning in science and public debate. In particular I discuss a) the requirement that a demonstration use verifiable premises whose middle term points out a cause for the predicate applying to the conclusion; b) how his analysis of valid syllogisms with a "wholly or partly false" universal premise applies to dialectical syllogisms. Aristotle’s logic is a major achievement of Greek

  • Plato's Antipaideia: Perplexity for the Guided

    3120 Words  | 7 Pages

    Guided ABSTRACT: ‘Paideia’ connotes the handing down and preservation of tradition and culture, even civilization, through education. Plato’s education of philosophers in the Academy is inimical to such an essentially conservative notion. His dialectical method is inherently dynamic and open-ended: not only are such conclusions as are reached in the dialogues subject to further criticism, so are the assumptions on which those conclusions are based. In these and other ways explored in this paper

  • Plato's Dialogues As Educational Models

    5408 Words  | 11 Pages

    Dialogue, Dialectic, and Maieutic: Plato's Dialogues As Educational Models ABSTRACT: Plato’s Socrates exemplies the progress of the dialectical method of inquiry. Such a method is capable of actualizing an interlocutor’s latent potential for philosophizing dialectically. The dianoetic practice of Plato’s Socrates is a mixture of dialectical assertions and questions arising out of his ethical concern for the interlocutor. The Dialogues act as educational models exhibiting how one inquires and learns

  • Ethics and Community in Aristotle

    5410 Words  | 11 Pages

    Aristotle ABSTRACT: I show that Aristotle’s ethics is determined by his notion of communities which are in turn determined by hundreds of themes in his Topics-sameness and difference, part and whole, better than, etc. These are tools for all dialectical investigations into being and action (viz. Top. I.11 104b2) for they secure definitions and get at essences of things or their aspects. Reflecting structures of being and good, they allow Aristotle to arrive at objective reality and good. Being

  • Keats and the Senses of Being: Ode on a Grecian Urn (Stanza V)

    3370 Words  | 7 Pages

    approach to the ode’s famously controversial fifth stanza (the one containing the Urn’s declaration: "Beauty is truth, truth beauty"). I demonstrate how William Desmond’s metaphysics of Being-specifically his analysis of the univocal, equivocal, dialectical, and metaxological senses of being-affords the groundwork for a "hermeneutics of the between" that elucidates the ode’s culminating stanza with all of the cogency and nuance that one would expect to derive from a systematic ontology. In what

  • Invisibility Over Negation in Invisible Man

    3867 Words  | 8 Pages

    communism is challenged.  The "Brotherhood," a nascent ultra-left party that offers invisibles a sense of purpose and identity, is dismantled from beneath as Ellison indirectly dissolves its underlying ideology:  dialectical materialism.  Black and white become positives in dialectical flux; riots and racism ... ... middle of paper ... ... with Ralph Ellison.  Jackson:  U of Mississippi P, 1995. Hersey, John, ed.  Ralph Ellison:  A Collection of Critical Essays.  Englewood Cliffs:  Prentice-Hall

  • Marxist Criticism

    1335 Words  | 3 Pages

    necessitate changes in society. For example, the introduction of heavy machinery into the feudal economic system fragmented existing social structures and necessitated a move towards capitalism. The base and superstructure model Within Marx's dialectical account of history is the idea that a given individual's social being is determined by larger political and economic forces. Marx writes that "it is not the consciousness of men that determines their being, but, on the contrary, their social being

  • Education for Cosmopolis

    7039 Words  | 15 Pages

    another. Cosmopolis, as a higher viewpoint of a culture, is based on the power of detachment and disinterestedness of human spirit; it is not an utopia nor an imaginative synthesis. A cosmopolitan education is radically emancipative. It involves a dialectical self-appropriation of the dynamic unit of human consciousness in the variables of development. Self-appropriation involves a fourfold conversion: psycho-affective, intellectual, moral, and religious. A cosmopolitan education also teaches us to think

  • Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit, Eco's The Myth of Superman, and Camus'The Fall

    3813 Words  | 8 Pages

    One great example is G.W.F. Hegel, an eighteenth-century philosopher who first named dialectical relationships. In his book Phenomenology of Spirit, Hegel details the relations between people and ideas in a way that now seems obvious, but was groundbreaking at the time. He opens his discussion by describing consciousness meeting as master and slave, and describes the development of the interaction in a dialectical fashion. In this particular situation, the slave receives an original definition from

  • The Horizons of Theory: Jameson, Marxism, and Poststructuralism

    2018 Words  | 5 Pages

    It may easily be read as a refutation of poststructuralism, or as an embrace of it; as a flight from Marxism (though under its own banner), or as its theoretical redemption – this is not a contradiction (we might read Jameson as replying), but a dialectical, productive exploration of the tension between these philosophies. Indeed, Jameson's exposition of his Marxist hermeneutic may be taken as a reply (from within a discourse he perceives as Marxism) to the poststructuralisms of Jacques Derrida and

  • Socially Constructed Reality and Meaning in Notes from Underground

    1883 Words  | 4 Pages

    are ultimately meaningless. The underground man’s refusal to objectify social reality causes a feeling of meaninglessness and raises a fundamental question of purpose that confronts people of all dispositions. Berger’s theory is based on a dialectical relationship between man and society. To explain his theory he defines three terms. “Externalization is the ongoing outpouring of human being into the world. Objectivation, the attainment by the products of this activity of a reality that confronts

  • The Genius of Plato

    1795 Words  | 4 Pages

    be descended from the early kings of Athens died, and his mother, Perictione married Pyrilampes. As a young man Plato was always interested in political leadership and eventually became a disciple of Socrates. He followed his philosophy and his dialectical style, which is believed to be the search for truth through questions, answers, and additional questions. After witnessing the death of Socrates at the hands of the Athenian democracy in 399 B.C., Plato left Athens and continued to travel to Italy

  • Unifying Dualism of Women in Society

    4422 Words  | 9 Pages

    ì...the relationship between subject and object, consciousness and reality, thought and being, theory and practiceî (73).He says that, ìAny attempt to deal with the relationship that is based upon the subject-object dualism, while denying their dialectical unity, is unable to satisfactorily explain this relationshipî (Freire, as cited in Weiler 73).A similar relationship exists in the relationship between woman and intellectual.A ìsmartî, ìintelligentî, or ìintellectualî woman is often seen as a coveted

  • Hegel's Master-Slave Dialectic

    4407 Words  | 9 Pages

    "for-itself." Not only does Hegel place this unfolding of Life at the very beginning of the dialectical development of self-consciousness, but he characterizes self-consciousness itself as a form of Life and points to the advancement of self-consciousness in the Master/Slave dialectic as the development of Life becoming "for-itself." This paper seeks to delineate this often overlooked thread of dialectical insight as it unfolds in the Master/Slave dialectic. Hegel articulates a vision of the place

  • marxism

    3151 Words  | 7 Pages

    by Hegel, Feuerbach, Kant, and other German philosophers. All of these guys, including Marx, are interested in the relation between materialist and idealist philosophy. As a philosopher, Marx helps create and define a branch of philosophy called DIALECTICAL MATERIALISM. Materialism in general is the branch of Western philosophy from which science (Aristotelian or Newtonian) comes. Materialist philosophy is based on empiricism, on the direct observation of measurable or observable phenomena; materialist

  • The Entertainment Value of a Buffy the Vampire Episode

    5132 Words  | 11 Pages

    concentrate on entertainment for entertainment's sake which is to say as a dialectical operation that in Fredric Jameson's terms intermingles wish fulfilment and repression by arousing radical fantasies in order to contain them (Jameson, 1990: 25). In order to analyse this mechanism I will concentrate less on consumers and ideology (that assumes unilateral transmission) and more on fans and affect (that inscribes a dialectical procedure into reception). What seems to me to be of specific interest