Category:Dialectic

Dialectic (also dialectics) was in antiquity and the Middle Ages a method of verbal argumentation in philosophical and theological disputes based on strict logic. The founder of the dialectical method is said to have been Zeno of Elea. In the Middle Ages, together with grammar and rhetoric, it formed the trivium in the canon of the Seven Liberal Arts.

From the 18th century onwards, dialectics became more and more a philosophical method of thought for finding and overcoming the opposites in things and concepts by progressing from the thesis via the antithesis to the synthesis, in which the opposites were to be cancelled out on a higher level. This method was particularly brought to fruition by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel.