The perennial problem of the relation of reason to faith, already ably discussed by St. The traditional logic, or dialectic, of Aristotle's "Organon"-the science and art of (mainly deductive) reasoning-found its proper application in exploring the domain of purely natural truth, but in the early Middle Ages it began to be applied by some Catholic theologians to the elucidation of the supernatural truths of the Christian Revelation. Thus Kant describes as "transcendental dialectic" his criticism of the (to him futile) attempts of speculative human reason to attain to a knowledge of such ultimate realities as the soul, the universe, and the Deity while the monistic system, in which Hegel identified thought with being and logic with metaphysics, is commonly known as the "Hegelian dialectic". It is, however, not quite synonymous with the latter in the objective sense of the science of real being, abstracting from the thought processes by which this real being is known, but rather in the more subjective sense in which it denotes the study of being in connection with the mind, the science of knowledge in relation to its object, the critical investigation of the origin and validity of knowledge as pursued in psychology and epistemology. with reality, it was natural that the term dialectic should be again extended from function to object, from thought to thing and so, even as early as Plato, it had come to signify the whole science of reality, both as to method and as to content, thus nearly approaching what has been from a somewhat later period universally known as metaphysics. (3) Further, the aim of all argumentation being presumably the acquisition of truth or knowledge about reality, and the process of cognition being inseparably bound up with its content or object, i.e.
It has always, moreover, connoted special aptitude or acuteness in reasoning, "dialectical skill" and it was because of this characteristic of Zeno's polemic against the reality of motion or change that this philosopher is said to have been styled by Aristotle the master or founder of dialectic. In this sense it is synonymous with logic. (2) But as the process of reasoning is more fundamental than its oral expression, the term dialectic came to denote primarily the art of inference or argument.
The word dialectics still retains this meaning in the theory of education. (1) In Greek philosophy the word originally signified "investigation by dialogue", instruction by question and answer, as in the heuristic method of Socrates and the dialogues of Plato. Includes the Catholic Encyclopedia, Church Fathers, Summa, Bible and more all for only $19.99.
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