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Aristotle on Dialectic

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

Roger Crisp
Roger Crisp
Affiliation:
University College, Oxford
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Extract

In his recent paper on Aristotelian dialectic, Professor Hamlyn claims that ‘what may be important for Aristotle's purposes is not the truth but the acceptance of the truth’ (p. 474). Dialectic is protreptic, and not strictly philosophical, spadework: ‘[t]he appeal to endoxa is, as it were, a setting of the scene, providing the context for argument out of which, it is hoped, will emerge the insights from which demonstration and thus further understanding can follow’ (p. 475).

Type
Discussion
Information
Philosophy , Volume 66 , Issue 258 , October 1991 , pp. 522 - 524
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1991

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References

1 ‘Aristotle on Dialectic’, Philosophy 65 (1990), 465–76.Google Scholar

2 Omitting t'alēthes at 1098b12 (Rassow).

3 On the relation in general between the account of dialectic in the Topics and its practice in the Ethics, see, in addition to the relevant chapters of his book discussed by Irwin, Hamlyn T. H., ‘First Principles in Aristotle's Ethics’, Midwest Studies in Philosophy 3, 1978, 257CrossRefGoogle Scholar; 269, n. 19. Irwin's overall interpretation is persuasively criticized by Roche, T. D., ‘On the alleged metaphysical foundation of Aristotle's Ethics’, Ancient Philosophy 8 (1988), 51–62.CrossRefGoogle Scholar

4 See also Eudemian Ethics 1.6, 1216b26–36; Metaphysics II.1, 993a30–b4. These passages among others are discussed illuminatingly in Barnes, Jonathan, ‘Aristotle and the Methods of Ethics’, Revue Internationale de Philosophie 34 (1981), 490–511Google Scholar. Hamlyn criticizes Martha Nussbaum for failing to provide an account of dialectical method (p. 467). Barnes is not open to this criticism. Hamlyn also bemoans the lack of ‘principles and criteria’ for the use of endoxic evidence, if such there be, in Aristotelian science (p. 475). An extension of Barnes's systematization of Aristotle's ethical thought might meet any such lack.

5 Reason and Human Good in Aristotle (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1975), 68Google Scholar. I am grateful to the British Academy for support provided during the writing of this note, in the form of a Postdoctoral Research Fellowship.