The Republic · ¶4905

Dialectic. [Dialectic, the ‘coping stone of knowledge,’ is everywhere distinguished by Plato from eristic, i.e., argument for argument’s sake [cp. Euthyd. 275 foll., 293; Meno 75 D; Phaedo 101; Phil. 17; Theaet. 167 E]. It is that ‘gift of heaven’ (Phil. 16) which teaches men to employ the hypotheses of science, not as final results, but as points from which the mind may rise into the higher heaven of ideas and behold truth and being. This vague and magnificent conception was probably hardly clearer to Plato himself when he wrote the Republic than it is to us [cp. Introduction, p. xcii.]; but in the Sophist and Statesman it appears in a more definite form as a combination of analysis and synthesis by which we arrive at a true notion of things. [Cp. the ὑφηγημένη μεθόδος of Aristotle (Pol. i. 1, § 3; 8, § 1), which is an analogous mode of proceeding from the parts to the whole.] In the…

Plato · translated by Benjamin Jowett · composite transcription based on the 1888 third edition
Benjamin Jowett, revised third edition (1888), with Stephanus numbering from the 1908 edition; composite transcription, Project Gutenberg #55201
Passage preview. Read in context for the complete text, notes and references.