Beginning with the premise that there is a fundamental biological inequality in the sexes, the author presents her classic blueprint for social revolution. Reissue. 25,000 first printing.

The _Symposium_ is one of Plato’s most accessible dialogues, an engrossing historical document as well as an entertaining literary masterpiece. By uncovering the structural design of the dialogue, _Plato’s Dialectic at Play _aims at revealing a Plato for whom the dialogical form was not merely ornamentation or philosophical methodology but the essence of philosophical exploration: his dialectic is not only argument, it is also play. Careful analysis of each layer of the text leads cumulatively to a picture of (...) the dialogue’s underlying structure, related to both argument and myth, and shows that a dynamic link exists between Diotima’s higher mysteries and the organization of the dialogue as a whole. On this basis the authors argue that the _Symposium_, with its positive theory of art contained in the ascent to the Beautiful, may be viewed as a companion piece to the Republic, with its negative critique of the role of art in the context of the Good. Following Nietzsche’s suggestion and applying criteria developed by Mikhail Bakhtin, they further argue for seeing the _Symposium_ as the first novel. The book concludes with a comprehensive reevaluation of the significance of the _Symposium_ and its place in Plato’s thought generally, touching on major issues in Platonic scholarship: the nature of art, the body-soul connection, the problem of identity, the relationship between _mythos_ and logos, Platonic love, and the question of authorial writing and the vanishing signature of the absent Plato himself. (shrink)

Neoplatonist commentators generally regarded Plato as having a unified account of a method called 'dialectic'. This paper looks at the manner in which they reconciled the idea of dialectic from the Republic (with its ascent to an unhypothetical first principle) with the method of collection and division described in dialogues like Phaedrus and Philebus and seemingly illustrated in dialogues like the Statesman.

Develops the theme of divine power raised in the previous chapter. Is God for Calvin a tyrant, a God of pure will? In the light of a consideration of the mediaeval 'power dialectic between God's 'absolute' and ordained' power, it is shown how Calvin upholds the essence of this distinction but deplores separating God's power from his righteousness. There is a discussion of the relation between the will of God and the atonement of Christ, and of the extent to (...) which it is reasonable to think that Calvin was a 'Scotist'. (shrink)

One of Kant’s major contributions to modern philosophy was the recognition that genuine knowledge is never a mere patchwork of items of information, whether gathered from empirical sources or from intellectual, whether inductively inferred or deductively derived from first principles. “If each and every single representation were completely foreign, isolated and separate from every other,” he declared, “nothing would ever arise such as knowledge, which is a whole of related and connected elements.” Of this fact, Hegel was unshakably convinced. “The (...) Truth,” he maintained, “is the whole”; but it is no undifferentiated, featureless whole, no Schellingian night in which all cows are black. “The true form in which the truth exists can only be the scientific system itself”. (shrink)

For Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), logic as a discipline belongs to the human faculty of reason, more precisely to the faculty of language. This discipline of logic breaks down into two areas. Logic or analytics is one side of the coin; dialectic or the art of persuasion is the other. The former investigates rule-oriented and monological language. The latter investigates result-oriented language and persuasive language...

Alfred North Whiteheadrsquo;s critique of modern naturalisms suggest that they betray reason by ignoring the vast extent and depth of the problematic of symbolism. This is partly borne out by the still unexplained fact that highly abstract systems of symbolism, as in mathematics, can throw light on the hidden workings of nature. But since these include ordinary perception itself, and since symbolisms always mediate between minds and nature, all reasonings about truth or reality elicit references to mysterious natural powers. Good (...) reasoning in natural philosophy thus requires an artful dialectic which is primarily concerned not with exact analyses of meanings but rather with the element of creativity in their ongoing production. Such a dialectic must be based on a polar logic that is opposed to the modern tendency to treat fundamental conceptual contrasts, such as nature-culture, subject-object, matter-spirit, and so on, as separable. (shrink)

The bulk of Kant's Critique of Pure Reason is divided, in its philosophical content if not its formal organization, into two parts. The first, encompassing the Introduction, the Aesthetic and the Transcendental Analytic, presents a theory of metaphysical knowledge; its source and nature, its proper objects, and its fundamental principles. The second part, contained in the Transcendental Dialectic, is a theory of metaphysical error, illusion, or pseudoknowledge. For various reasons, students of the Critique have tended to neglect the second (...) part of Kant's project in favor of the first, though there is no evidence that Kant himself regarded it as less important or less essential to the critical philosophy. (shrink)

Incorporating Gadamer and other thinkers from the continental tradition, this essay is a close and detailed hermeneutic, phenomenological, and ontological study of the dialectic practice of Plato’s Socrates—it radicalizes and refutes the Socrates-as-teacher model that educators from scholar academic ideology embrace.

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Reviewed by:Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom: Readings in Epistles 1Barbara K. GoldW. R. Johnson. Horace and the Dialectic of Freedom: Readings in Epistles 1. Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1993. xiv 1 172 pp. Cloth, $27.50. (Townsend Lectures)A colleague once expressed shock that I was reading Horace’s Epistles. They are, she said, the most boring works in all of Latin literature. It seems likely that this was (...) not an idiosyncratic pronouncement: the Epistles are rarely the subjects of critical work and even less frequently taught.But now we have the second book to appear in the past decade on the first book of Horace’s Epistles. Ross Kilpatrick’s 1986 volume on The Poetry of Friendship: Horace, Epistles 1 focused closely on the theme of amicitia in these poems. Now Ralph Johnson has produced a new appreciation of Horace by tracing another theme through Horace’s letters to his friends: freedom. The book is less a critical exegesis of the Epistles than a highly personal and emotionally charged meditation on what drove Horace to write these so-called letters in the twilight of his composing years. The chapter headings indicate the unorthodox approach Johnson has chosen: “Running on Empty,” “In the Rag and Bone Shop,” “Gardens.”Johnson presents us with a Horace who is engaged in a “messy” and irresoluble dialectic with himself, his friends, and his readers. Neither Horace nor Johnson offers any comforting or banal bipolarities; Johnson cautions often against the sic et non approach whereby we, like boll weevils, bore through the haze of confusions looking for the “nugget” (Virginia Woolf’s word) behind the complexities instead of accepting the power of antinomies and their meaning for human experience (144). Johnson’s Horace is thus an ambivalent and protean creature: still a satirist, but somewhat softer now than he was in the 30s; an outsider looking in but never really a part of the hive; a man suffused with anger and resentment, yet capable of a dry and impartial skepticism and a sanguine hope about our ability to live our lives well; carnal and crazy, but mature and clear-headed; an Orphic shaman figure, who mediates between lowly humans and figures of the great (Augustus) or nature herself and delivers the truth from his lofty position, but also a poet of lowly beginnings, caught in embarrassing positions and forced to kowtow to his superiors; a man absolutely insistent on his [End Page 335] freedom and individuality yet part of a court circle of sorts; a wry picaro who nonetheless sometimes plays the role of Stoic progrediens: a naughty scarecrow in the garden, an agrarian sophist, with one foot in the city and one on his Sabine farm, trying to figure out how to be a proper gardener.But, for me, there are too many Horaces here, and they cannot all exist simultaneously. It is hard to see the spontaneous, wry picaro next to the poet who desires a return to civility and decorum or the committed city dweller who develops a love for the rural life. While it may be true that Horace changed masks when the occasion suited, his representations of himself seem to me to be fairly consistent by Ep. 1.20. The Horace I see here is more comfortable with himself than Johnson’s Horace is. He has come to terms with Maecenas, with his father, and with his life in Rome. He understands why it is necessary to avoid chasing after wealth (fuge magna, 10.32) in order to achieve the internal peace and true freedom that he seeks. But he is always a city dweller and never comfortable with his Sabine farm as more than a symbol of what the rural life could offer. (In an interesting aside, Johnson admits that he might be sentimentalizing Horace’s view of the farm: “I’m an ardent urbanite without even a window box” [150 n. 5].) Horace saw and used elements of nature throughout his poetry as evocative symbols of the place of human life in the larger natural universe, but I’m certain that he never got his hands dirty.It is, however, no wonder that so... (shrink)

In a recent paper, Eckart Förster challenges interpreters to explain why in the first Critique practical reason has a canon but no dialectic, whereas in the second Critique, there is not only a dialectic, but an antinomy of practical reason. In the Groundwork, Kant claims that there is a natural dialectic with respect to morality (4:405), a different claim from those advanced in the first and second Critiques. Förster's challenge may therefore be reformulated as the problem of (...) explaining why practical reason has a canon in the first Critique, a dialectic in the Groundwork, and an antinomy in the second Critique. In this paper, I answer this challenge. I argue that these differences are due to the different aims and scope of the works, and in particular, the different place of the inclinations in their arguments. (shrink)

The main feature of any type of dialectic seems to be a drive for totalities or wholes, that is to say, a drive towards a synoptic view. This might be realized in various forms, either in systems of thought or in systems embracing both thought and being. The well known formal features of dialectic, that is to say, the contradiction of concepts, is but an indication that the inner movement--as Hegel put it--of concepts in their development toward the (...) establishment or manifestation of the whole takes place through and because of concepts. (shrink)

With the flowering of postcolonialism, we return to Frantz Fanon, a leading theorist of the struggle against colonialism. In this thorough reinterpretation of Fanon's texts, Ato Sekyi-Otu ensures that we return to him fully aware of the unsuspected formal complexity and substantive richness of his work. A Caribbean psychiatrist trained in France after World War II and an eloquent observer of the effects of French colonialism on its subjects from Algeria to Indochina, Fanon was a controversial figure--advocating national liberation and (...) resistance to colonial power in his bestsellers, Black Skin, White Masks and The Wretched of the Earth. But the controversies attending his life--and death, which some ascribed to the CIA--are small in comparison to those surrounding his work. Where admirers and detractors alike have seen his ideas as an incoherent mixture of Existentialism, Marxism, and psychoanalysis, Sekyi-Otu restores order to Fanon's oeuvre by reading it as one dramatic dialectical narrative. Fanon's Dialectic of Experience invites us to see Fanon as a dramatist enacting a movement of experience--the drama of social agents in the colonial context and its aftermath--in a manner idiosyncratically patterned on the narrative structure of Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit. By recognizing the centrality of experience to Fanon's work, Sekyi-Otu allows us to comprehend this much misunderstood figure within the tradition of political philosophy from Aristotle to Arendt. Reviews of this book: "The goal of this often brilliant and always engaging book is to 'read Fanon's texts as though they formed one dramatic dialectical narrative'; the principal subject of this dramatic narrative, according to Sekyi-Otu, is 'political experience'. It is his deployment of a dialectical analysis of Fanon's 'dramatic personae' that permits Sekyi-Otu's fresh and insightful readings to take place." DD--Anthony C. Alessandrini, Minnesota Review "Ato Sekyi-Otu departs from the postmodernist paradigm and ushers in an alternative hermeneutic that primarily considers Fanon's texts as forming 'one dramatic dialectical narrative,' that is a narrative whose complexity is correlative of the intricate configurations of African social experience during the post-independent era...[His] book is an invaluable contribution that offers broader scope for a new appreciation of Fanon's political thinking." DD--Marc Mve Bekale, Revue AFRAM Review [UK] "[I]mportant...The author succeeds in...revealing the complexity and nuanced character of Fanon's thought." DD--Choice "Those who would dismiss or exult Fanon as the high priest of revolutionary violence will be chastened by this patient and completely convincing exposition of his work. Sekyi-Otu produces a reflexive, 'Gramscian' Fanon who, working as a 'detective of the politics of truth,' has produced insights that need to be taken over into the core of democratic political thought." DD--Paul Gilroy, University of London. (shrink)