The Art of Dialectic between Dialogue and Rhetoric

Controversies: Ethics and Interdisciplinarity #9

by Marta Spranzi

This book reconstructs the tradition of dialectic from Aristotle's Topics , its founding text, up to its "renaissance" in 16th century Italy, and focuses on the role of dialectic in the production of knowledge. Aristotle defines dialectic as a structured exchange of questions and answers and thus links it to dialogue and disputation, while Cicero develops a mildly skeptical version of dialectic, identifies it with reasoning in utramque partem and connects it closely to rhetoric. These two interpretations constitute the backbone of the living tradition of dialectic and are variously developed in the Renaissance against the Medieval background. The book scrutinizes three separate contexts in which these developments
Rudolph Agricola's attempt to develop a new dialectic in close connection with rhetoric, Agostino Nifo's thoroughly Aristotelian approach and its use of the newly translated commentaries of Alexander of Aphrodisias and Averroes, and Carlo Sigonio's literary theory of the dialogue form, which is centered around Aristotle's Topics .
Today, Aristotelian dialectic enjoys a new life within argumentation the final chapter of the book briefly revisits these contemporary developments and draws some general epistemological conclusions linking the tradition of dialectic to a fallibilist view of knowledge.

Genres: Philosophy

252 pages, Hardcover

First published June 15, 2011

Reviews

[Stephen Lee · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book was rather more academic than I was hoping. I was looking for a description of the attempts to formalise rules of discussion in order to achieve a balance between getting bogged down with spurious responses and closing off legitimate responses. This book was more of an examination of what Aristotle meant by the words he used, and how later writers interpreted them. There's a lot of analysis of what the word endoxa. Was the interpretation 'probable' a reasonable one, and do we then have to interpret 'probable' as 'susceptible to proof' rather than the current idea of 'likely but uncertain'? There's a look at the relationship between dialectic and rhetoric, but more in terms of what concepts different people assigned to each heading, rather than how they tried to find arguments which were persuasive but avoided sophistry.
The book does introduce the main players in the study of dialectic, including Cicero, Boethius and Rudolphus Agricola, but as it is concerned with Aristotelian ideas it skips over a few centuries to get to modern views on the subject. I felt, though, that I didn't really end up with much of a feeling for how ideas about dialectic progressed over the centuries, and that to get this I would need to look elsewhere.