This chapter analyzes Plotinus’ connection of dialectic to grasping Intellect’s holistic unity. It examines how Ennead III 7 links the dialectical method to the unity of the Greatest Kinds, and how Ennead VI 7 redefines the roles of Sameness and Otherness within Intellect’s life. Plotinus presents Intellect as self-same yet generating internal otherness through division, offering an ‘inverted’ interpretation of the Sophist’s interweaving (συμπλοκή) of kinds.

This chapter analyzes Aristotle’s criticism of dichotomous division, focusing especially on the first Book of the De partibus animalium. It argues that Speusippus, not Plato, is the direct target of this criticism, but that Aristotle also indirectly addresses a Platonic norm of division, explicitly argued in the Statesman and plausibly applied in the Sophist. The chapter contends that Aristotle and the Academics shared a common agenda on cross-cutting divisions and establishing norms for discovering essences, even while fundamentally disagreeing on method.

The introduction provides some material data on the reception of the Sophist (including an overview of all the skopoi it was assigned and all the ancient commentaries on the dialogue the sources give us notice of), and a bird’s-eye view of some of the main themes and arguments featured in the dialogue, with the prospect of highlighting the main threads of its ancient fortune and providing a synopsis of the fourteen chapters constituting the volume

The introduction takes the author’s hometown, Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, as a perspective. At the head of the Ohio River, Pittsburgh drew international observers who wished to study industrialization in the nineteenth century. Its rivers, coal, natural gas reservoirs, and oil fields catalyzed a fossil-fuel boom. The introduction illustrates the formation of a new idiom in the lyceums and lecture circuit of the industrial heartland and energy frontier of the Ohio River Valley, from Ralph Waldo Emerson’s 1851 lectures to Henry Adams’s account of a journey on the Pennsylvania Railroad in The Education of Henry Adams (1907), and of what Adams called “energies quite new.” This chapter provides an overview of energy and economy as contingent ideas. It shows how they raise basic questions about personhood and agency. “Burning Ideas” details a historiography shaped by Pittsburgh’s productive forces, explains the book’s dialectical approach, and concludes with chapter summaries.

Neruda’s temperament was not theoretical, yet several “canonical” poems of his are infused with Marxist thinking. Although there is no evidence that Neruda read Marxist theory, in his thirties he assimilated its totalizing thought from party activism, from his second wife Delia, and from his friend, Spanish poet Rafael Alberti, each a lifelong communist. As an instance, Neruda’s poem “La United Fruit Co.” brings together four types of corporations, economic control of the state, the transportation of product, and subordination of labor. “The Strike” depicts the role of class conflict in the production process. “Cristóbal Miranda (shoveler-Tocopilla)” is one of fifteen portraits of industrial workers focusing on ordinary folk-history-from-below. “Los dictadores,” with its monster engendered by the wealthy autocrat in his palace, demonstrates the functioning of the dialectic in history. Neruda’s Marxism, though more intuitive than discursive, shapes these and other related poems of his.

At the end of the discussion with Crito, Socrates invokes the Corybantic ritual, which does not stand for an irrational or emotional force, as shown by careful consideration of the nature of that ritual. As the dialogue ends, Socrates remains open to new arguments, as always, but Crito has none to offer and time has run out.

To make a start on understanding what a ‘Hegelian theodicy’ might be, this chapter begins by examining Hegel’s brief but obscure discussion of the ‘Idea of the good’ towards the culmination of the Science of Logic. By expounding the notion of autonomous volition, this section not only contains an explicit critique of Kantian theodicy and its paradoxical consequences, but contains some of Hegel’s own most theodical language, outlining how overcoming the Kantian standpoint enables a correct understanding of the relation between what is and what ought to be. Claiming that the Kantian paradoxes result from the will’s taking a faulty stance towards itself, he notes that he has already explained how the will undergoes the necessary process of self-correction in the final section of the chapter on ‘Spirit’ in the Phenomenology of Spirit. In order to be in a position to take up this hint, the chapter then turns to explaining the method of the Phenomenology, understood both as a preparatory theodicy, a propaedeutic to ‘true science’, and as a text that exemplifies ‘Hegelian theodicy’ in its own right.

Chapter 2 examines three problems in Heidegger’s interpretations of Plato: the impasse of dialogue and dialectic, Heidegger’s disastrous and putatively Platonic politics, and the reductive approach to Plato’s metaphysics. First, I question his critique of Platonic dialectic by showing that it is already built into the matter as well as the way of writing in Plato’s texts. Second, I show that Heidegger’s ontologizing of political themes in Plato’s writings leads him to a catastrophic “ontological politics” wherein ethics and politics in their concrete sense are completely eclipsed by or absorbed into ontology. Third, I show that the interpretations that Heidegger offers to show that Plato allegedly occluded the original sense of truth and distorted the question of Being. A closer look at the relevant passages as well as other passages that Heidegger overlooked reveals a much more dynamic ontology than what Heidegger sees in Platonism understood as metaphysics. The concluding remarks of the chapter sketch the post-Heideggerian directions leading from these three problems to the Platonism of Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger.

Chapter 4 deals with the philosophical meaning of dialogue as a form of writing and thinking. I take as my starting point the apparent paradox of Plato’s written critique of writing in the Phaedrus and explain how Gadamer, Strauss, and Krüger resolve this question. For all three of them (inspired by Friedländer on this point), dialogical writing overcomes the deficiencies inherent to writing. I argue that for all three of them, dialogical writing and dialogical thinking reflect the practical embeddedness of philosophical inquiry: for Strauss, it is the political situatedness of the philosopher that has priority; for Gadamer, it is our ethical facticity; for Krüger, it is the fundamental attunements (Stimmungen) of philosophy. The chapter also explains how these three trajectories propose three different interpretations of the meaning of Socratic and Platonic irony, which is a key feature of Plato’s dialogical compositions.

In the deliberation entitled, “Love Does Not Seek Its Own,” Kierkegaard develops his notion of distinctiveness [Ejendommelighed] vis-à-vis neighbor love. He introduces a dialectical tension between the duty to seek one’s own as a human task implicated by the divine gift of distinctiveness and the imperative to seek only the neighbor’s own. This chapter unpacks Kierkegaard’s notion of Eiendommelighed, its relationship to courage, Frimodighed [bold confidence], the love commands, and self-sacrifice. Despite his strongly self-sacrificial rhetoric, love demands the cultivation of one’s own distinctiveness, which itself must be understood dialectically as both being one’s own and not one’s own. A dialectical approach affords a more nuanced reading of Works of Love that better reflects the existential complexity of navigating the tension of self-development and self-sacrifice on the ground. To fulfill the duty to develop distinctiveness in both self and other, love must both seek and not seek its own.

Chapter 2 discusses fragments surviving from Iamblichus’ correspondence. This correspondence, which includes open letters destined for a wider readership, seems to have been collected for use in the philosophical schools. The collection contains letters which originally, I argue, were of different types. One type is that of an exhortation (a ‘protreptic’) to the study of a science, in this case dialectic. I compare this protreptic with that to be found in Iamblichus’ De communi mathematica scientia; both protreptics correspond to the rhetorical model for the praise of a science. Another type of open letter is that which proposes a ‘Mirror of Princes’ for the edification of people in power and their entourage. A third type to be found in the letters is a monograph which discusses a difficult philosophical question: the relation between fate and freedom. If addressed to a well-educated professional, perhaps a former student of Iamblichus, this letter could have had a wider circulation.

In the Republic, Socrates sets up rational self-rule, archein hautou, as the ideal state, with what we might call rational other-rule as second best (590d3-5). This paper will focus on the role of dialectic in the process of establishing self-rule from two perspectives: an agent having been raised by an educational program under ideal political conditions, focusing on the Republic; and an agent trying to engage in philosophical self-improvement under non-ideal political conditions, focusing on the Hippias Major. This may be seen as a contrast between a top-down and a bottom-up approach to establishing rational self-rule. My thesis is that, in both cases, an intermediate or provisional form of rational self-rule needs to be established in order to achieve full self-rule, and that, in both approaches, the provisional state of rational self-rule shares some important features of the final state of rational self-rule, what we might call wisdom, but these are different features in the two cases.

The chapter explores how Aristotle wants to account for perception’s essentially receptive nature. It focuses on Aristotle’s commitment to the passivity of perception, namely, the idea that perception is a certain kind of being affected (paskhein) by perceptual objects. It provides a classification and preliminary critical analysis of existing interpretations of the passivity of perception. I argue that Aristotle’s first general account of perception in An. 2.5 is systematically pre-causal in the sense that makes it impossible to directly infer from it anything specific about the respective roles of the body and the soul (against both Material and Psychic Interpretation). Furthermore, I contend that Aristotle develops a robust conception of passivity here that successfully encapsulates, on the most general level, what perception is (against Deflationary and Aporetic Interpretation). More specifically, I argue that An. 2.5 is centrally aimed at reconciling perception’s passivity and completeness (the perceiver has both seen and is seeing the same object) and that this task is motivated by the need for capturing the difference between genuine (‘continued’) perceiving and mere appearance within an assimilation model of perception.

The Introduction sets out the argument of the book, and distinguishes the approach taken from those of Louis Althusser and Daniel Brudney. It offers a preliminary assessment of the difference made by reading Marx’s project as that of the actualization of philosophy, and of the implications for understanding his relationship to his philosophical predecessors.

This chapter examines the genuine dialectic at work in Capital Volume 1 (to be contrasted with the failed dialectic of Hegel). A focus of the chapter is the role of opposition and contradiction in this non-pre-determined dialectic. Attempts to read Marx as if he meant to speak of opposition instead of contradiction are rejected; opposition is, instead, shown in much of the material in question to develop into contradiction. Contradiction does not follow one pre-established pattern; but Marx, throughout, works under the aegis of the Principle of Non-Contradiction. In a sense, the chapter outlines the methodology of Marx’s mature work, but only insofar as it is recognized that this methodology cannot be spelled out other than by retracing actual arguments in Marx.

This chapter examines the underlying logical failures that produce the strange effects on the surface of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right examined in the previous chapter. It turns out that Hegel did not merely make logical errors, but that his very logical procedures are philosophically defective. This is shown to rest on problems shared with Plato’s diairesis (method of division). The problem with Hegel’s treatment of the state is not that he has chosen to take a dialectical approach, but that his conception of dialectic is itself deficient.