Few ideas have played a more continuously prominent role throughout the history of philosophy than that of dialectic, which has figured on the philosophical agenda from the time of the Presocratics. This book explores the philosophical promise of dialectic, especially in its dialogical version associated with disputation, debate, and rational controversy. Its deliberations examine what lessons can be drawn to exhibit the utility of dialectical proceedings for the theory of knowledge in reminding us that the building up of knowledge is an interpersonally interactive enterprise subject to communal standards.

Table of Contents

PREFACE

Chapter 1: Dialectical Processes: A General View

Chapter 2: Disputational Dialectics

Chapter 3: Cognitive Dialectics

Chapter 4: Methodological Dialectic

Chapter 5: Ontological Dialectic: The Hegelian Background

Chapter 6: Philosophical Dialectics

Chapter 7: A Brief History of Dialectic

REFERENCES

NAME INDEX

Nicholas Rescher is professor of Philosophy at the University of Pittsburgh where he also served for many years as Director of the Center for Philosophy of Science. He is a former president of the Eastern Division of the American Philosophical Association, and has also served as President of the American Catholic Philosophical Association, the American Metaphysical Society, the American G. W. Leibniz Society, and the C. S. Peirce Society. An honorary member of Corpus Christi College, Oxford, he has been elected to membership in the European Academy of Arts and Sciences (Academia Europaea), the Institut International de Philosophie (France), and several other learned academies. He has held visiting lectureships at Oxford (UK), Constance (Germany), Salamanca (Spain), Munich (Germany), and Marburg (Germany), and has received six honorary degrees from universities on three continents. He is the author of some hundred books ranging over many areas of philosophy, over a dozen of them translated into other languages, and was awarded the Alexander von Humboldt Prize for Humanistic Scholarship in 1984.