<RT·section id="Section·Naturalism·The_argument_since">
<RT·name>The presumed dialectic</RT·name>
- <p>The pattern of a thesis met by its opposite and settled in a third position is commonly credited to Hegel; however, it was Fichte who first articulated it, and it was Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus who fixed the three names upon it in a popular history of 1837.
- <RT·endnote>Johann Gottlieb Fichte, <em>Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre</em> (Leipzig, 1794), §§1−3. Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, <em>Historische Entwicklung der speculativen Philosophie von Kant bis Hegel</em> (Dresden, 1837). Hegel’s own term is <em>Aufhebung</em>, in which a position is cancelled, preserved, and raised at once. The three-step formula is not in his vocabulary, and scholars of Hegel are quick to say so.</RT·endnote>
- The approach is easy to reach for and it is habit-forming. Our courtrooms, legislatures, and debating societies set rules for adversarial contest, and build in the expectation of progress by picking winners.</p>
+ <p>Our courtrooms, legislatures, and debating societies set rules for adversarial contest, and this instills our culture with the expectation that progress is made by picking winners. However each dialectic implies a deeper issue.
+ <RT·endnote>The pattern of a thesis met by its opposite and settled in a third position is commonly credited to Hegel, and it is not his. Fichte set out the triad in the <em>Grundlage der gesammten Wissenschaftslehre</em> (Leipzig, 1794), §§1−3, and Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus fixed the three names upon it in the <em>Historische Entwicklung der speculativen Philosophie von Kant bis Hegel</em> (Dresden, 1837), from which it passed into general use. Hegel’s own term is <em>Aufhebung</em>, in which a position is cancelled, preserved, and raised at once, and scholars of Hegel are quick to say that the three-step formula is not in his vocabulary.</RT·endnote>
+ Say two people debate if the room is too hot, or too cold, implied is the existence of temperature. Sometimes the deeper understanding resolves the debate by encompassing both sides.
+ </p>
- <p>There is an ancient story from India telling of blind men and an elephant. One takes hold of the trunk and reports a snake, one the ear and reports a fan, one the leg and reports a pillar. So then, if these men had a debate, who would the judge pick as the winner? Or should we accept mutually contradictory points of view as being indicative of a deeper truth? Not one synthesized, but one discovered.</p>
+ <p>There is an ancient story from India telling of blind men and an elephant. One takes hold of the trunk and reports a snake, one the ear and reports a fan, one the leg and reports a pillar. So then, if these men had a debate, who would the judge pick as the winner? Or should we accept mutually contradictory points of view as being indicative of a deeper truth? Perhaps not one synthesized, but one discovered.</p>
<p>After the Athenian Academy declined, the transmission of Greek thought fractured. Western Europe retained fragments of Aristotle’s logic while the corpus migrated east, carried by Syriac Christians to eighth-century Arabic-speaking scholars who rendered Aristotle, Euclid, and Galen into Arabic. The problem those scholars faced was fitting philosophical demonstration to Islamic faith.
<RT·endnote>Hunayn ibn Ishaq (809−873) and his circle drove the translation movement under Abbasid patronage. The arriving texts contained Aristotle layered with late-antique commentary and Neoplatonic adaptations circulating under his name, notably the <em>Theology of Aristotle</em> (an adaptation of Plotinus). See “Greek Sources in Arabic and Islamic Philosophy,” <em>Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy</em>.</RT·endnote>
projects / TM-2026 / commitdiff
