('Cratylus', Benjamin Jowett (trans)., in Hamilton and Cairns (ed)., Collected Dialogues, New York: Pantheon Books, 421e) Then, said I, is not dialectic the only process of inquiry that advances in this manner, doing away with hypotheses, up to the first principle itself in order to find confirmation there?
The movie has been described as dialectical, but two parts do not a dialectic make: something meaningful has to happen between those parts.
As a result, the dogmatic, not the dialectic, has its day.
Liberal democracy versus fanatic Islamist fundamentalism: that's not a dialectic, or even a geographic rivalry — it's two worlds conceptually (though not, alas, physically) sealed off from one another.
It makes its points not through dialectic but through dark comedy, and endorses direct action while admitting that: "We support the right to protest as long as it doesn't change anything".
Which confirmed my belief that good communication is about dialectic, not rhetoric; and showed me the value of speaking up without yelling.
More is not opposed to dialectic, and he probably had experience of the trivium during his stay in Oxford, but he wants a return to the dialectic of Aristotle, especially as now made available by humanist scholarship.
The only way that the country can regenerate itself is not through the dialectic between the old and the new (whether we call it Tsipras, Meimarakis or whoever), but by focusing on the regeneration of a Greek and European tradition of ethical and political cosmopolitanism.
I met Don Santiago Pi Suñez, the physiologist, and in another context we met Dr Carlos Guevara Moreno, who struck me as an intelligent demagogue, very knowledgeable about mass psychology but not about the dialectics of history.
Although the Dialectic does not presume to prove that such objects do not or could not exist, Kant is committed by the strictures of his own transcendental epistemology to the claim that the ideas of reason do not provide us with concepts of "knowable" objects.
Just because my preferred means of bringing the world into conformity with my desires is respectful dialectic does not mean that I cannot or would not avail myself of some other means of persuasion, or even deception or coercion (which includes lobbying for legislation), should the occasion demand the cooperation of others and seem sufficiently pressing by my cognitive and conative lights.
