"Dialectical" Quotes from Famous Books
 ... death under his native sky at Naples. Galiani's Dialogues on the Trade in Grain (1769-70) contained, under that most unpromising title, a piece of literature which for its verve, rapidity, wit, dialectical subtlety, and real strength of thought, has hardly been surpassed by masterpieces of a wider recognition. Voltaire vowed that Plato and Moliere must have combined to produce a book that was as amusing as the best of romances, and as instructive as the best of serious ...
— Diderot and the Encyclopaedists - Volume II. • John Morley
... the dialectic of Socrates. He has not yet experienced the influence of the Sophists like Glaucon and Adeimantus, nor is he sensible of the necessity of refuting them; he belongs to the pre-Socratic or pre-dialectical age. He is incapable of arguing, and is bewildered by Socrates to such a degree that he does not know what he is saying. He is made to admit that justice is a thief, and that the virtues follow the analogy ...
— The Republic • Plato
... battle of the schools with all its more than military strategy and tactics, and in the end it was a drawn battle, in spite of its marvels of intellectual heroism and dialectical ...
— Historia Calamitatum • Peter Abelard
... Yukon, of the lower three hundred miles of the Tanana and its tributaries, of the upper Kuskokwim have always called these mountains "Denali" (Den-ah'li) and "Denali's Wife"—either precisely as here written, or with a dialectical difference in pronunciation so slight as ...
— The Ascent of Denali (Mount McKinley) - A Narrative of the First Complete Ascent of the Highest - Peak in North America • Hudson Stuck
... masters of Notre Dame. The fame of this teacher drew multitudes of young men from the provinces to Paris, among whom there came, about 1100, Peter Abelard, scion of a noble family of Nantes. By his wit, erudition and dialectical sublety he soon eclipsed his master's fame and was appointed to a chair of philosophy in the school of Notre Dame. William, jealous of his young rival, compassed his dismissal, and after teaching for a while ...
— The Story of Paris • Thomas Okey
... Brussels—spinning a web that should be stout enough to entrap the noisy, blundering republicans at the Hague, yet so delicate as to go through the finest dialectical needle. Time was to show whether subtilty or bluntness ...
— The Rise of the Dutch Republic, 1555-1566 • John Lothrop Motley
... hence that their origin is to be traced to Persian sources. Even if so, they seemed to have escaped that confused and mystical philosophy which has robbed Oriental thought of much power in the realm of practical life. Philo says, "Of philosophy, the dialectical department, as being in no wise necessary for the acquisition of virtue, they abandon to the word-catchers; and the part which treats of the nature of things, as being beyond human nature, they leave to ...
— A Short History of Monks and Monasteries • Alfred Wesley Wishart
... fervour. He showed his principles in a public disputation with a Roman Catholic priest at Hereford. I do not know that either of them converted anybody; but John Venn's loveableness was not dependent upon dialectical ability. He was accepted, I may say, as the saint of our family; and Aylstone Hill, Hereford, where he lived with his unmarried sister Emelia, (a lady who in common sense and humour strongly resembled her brother Henry), was a place of pilgrimage ...
— The Life of Sir James Fitzjames Stephen, Bart., K.C.S.I. - A Judge of the High Court of Justice • Sir Leslie Stephen
... argument with expressions of inimitable quaintness, and flash out rays of kindly humor and witty irony; but his general tone was serious, and rose sometimes to genuine solemnity. His masterly skill in dialectical thrust and parry, his wealth of knowledge, his power of reasoning and elevation of sentiment, disclosed in language of rare precision, strength, and beauty, not ...
— The Papers And Writings Of Abraham Lincoln, Complete - Constitutional Edition • Abraham Lincoln
... another episode which marks a stage in the advance of this movement was the investigation and report by the Dialectical Society in the year 1869. This body was composed of men of various learned professions who gathered together to investigate the alleged facts, and ended by reporting that they really WERE facts. They were unbiased, and their conclusions were ...
— The Vital Message • Arthur Conan Doyle
... accordance with opinion, or by urging that at times it is not improbable; for there is a probability of things happening also against probability. (3) The contradictions found in the poet's language one should first test as one does an opponent's confutation in a dialectical argument, so as to see whether he means the same thing, in the same relation, and in the same sense, before admitting that he has contradicted either something he has said himself or what a man of sound sense assumes as true. But there is no possible apology for improbability ...
— The Poetics • Aristotle
... his followers were persecuted, for they set at nought the wisdom of the world and the customs and laws of ages. They shocked all conservative minds; all rulers and dignitaries; all men attached to systems; all syllogistic reasoners and dialectical theologians; all fashionable and worldly people; all sects and parties attached to creeds and forms. Neither their inoffensive lives, nor their doctrine of non-resistance, nor their elevated spiritualism ...
— A Modern History, From the Time of Luther to the Fall of Napoleon - For the Use of Schools and Colleges • John Lord
... had been summoned to appear by a mandat d'amener. He was a stout, dark, convivial-looking soul, with a merry eye, not altogether convinced of the enormity of his delict, and inclined at first to deprecate these proceedings. But the dialectical skill of the magistrate soon tied him into knots, and reduced him to a state of ...
— Leaves from a Field Note-Book • J. H. Morgan
... handle not; feet have they and walk not: neither speak they through their throat.' There is real hard reasoning underlying such noble rhetoric, though the Psalmist could not perhaps have reduced his argument against Polytheism and Idolatry to the form of a dialectical argument like Plato or St. Thomas Aquinas. In the highest instance of all—the case of our Lord Jesus Christ himself—a natural instinct of reverence is apt to deter us from analysing how he came ...
— Philosophy and Religion - Six Lectures Delivered at Cambridge • Hastings Rashdall
... with it. He was anything but a savage dog, proving, on the contrary, easily cowed; so that the fact of his ever having made such a sally soon surprised us. Whether he missed the occupation of looking after the work-people and guarding the line, or whether he only understood dialectical Italian, certain it is that he proved a most inert, taciturn dog. He would wander about for weeks in listless despondency, doing nothing for his living, and showing no intelligence except in the way of hiding bones. Although really young, his ...
— Lippincott's Magazine of Popular Literature and Science, Vol. XII. No. 31. October, 1873. • Various
... of thought.) Secondly, the later date of the dialogue is confirmed by the absence of the doctrine of recollection and of any doctrine of ideas except that which derives them from generalization and from reflection of the mind upon itself. The general character of the Theaetetus is dialectical, and there are traces of the same Megarian influences which appear in the Parmenides, and which later writers, in their matter of fact way, have explained by the residence of Plato at Megara. Socrates disclaims the character of a professional eristic, and also, with a sort of ironical ...
— Theaetetus • Plato
... easier to bear? Is a lover's feeling for his lady stronger before she has accepted him or afterwards? Is a bad noble or a poor but upright man more worthy to find favour? The discussion of such questions provided an opportunity of displaying both poetical dexterity and also dialectical acumen. But rarely did either of the disputants declare himself convinced or vanquished by his opponents' arguments the question [33] was left undecided or was referred ...
— The Troubadours • H.J. Chaytor
... also influenced about this time by the report of the Dialectical Society, although this Report had been presented as far back as 1869. It is a very cogent paper, and though it was received with a chorus of ridicule by the ignorant and materialistic papers of those days, it was a document of great value. The Society was formed by a number ...
— The New Revelation • Arthur Conan Doyle
... poet fitted very exactly the work he set himself to do. His work is always plain and easily understood; he had a fine faculty for narration, and the vigorous rapidity and point of his style enabled him to sketch a character or sum up a dialectical position very surely and effectively. His writing has a kind of spare and masculine force about it. It is this vigour and the impression which he gives of intellectual strength and of a logical grasp of his subject, that ...
— English Literature: Modern - Home University Library Of Modern Knowledge • G. H. Mair
... took two centuries and a half for civilised mankind to know Australia, even in form, from the time when it was clearly understood that there was such a country, until at length it was mapped, measured and circumnavigated. Before this process began, there was a dialectical stage, when it was hotly contested whether there could possibly be upon the globe lands antipodean to Europe; and both earlier and later there were conjectural stages when makers of maps, having no certain data, but feeling sure that the blank ...
— The Life of Captain Matthew Flinders • Ernest Scott
... logical and dialectical, in the manner described, and then into eristical. (3) Eristic is the method by which the form of the conclusion is correct, but the premisses, the materials from which it is drawn, are not true, but only appear to be true. Finally (4) Sophistic ...
— The Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer; The Art of Controversy • Arthur Schopenhauer
... To this dialectical use, by the intellect, of negation as a mode of passage towards a higher kind of affirmation, there is correlated the subtlest of moral counterparts in the sphere of the personal will. Since denial of the finite self and its wants, since ...
— The Varieties of Religious Experience • William James
... then passed in review: the first of them has no definition of the nature of love, and no order in the topics (being in these respects far inferior to the second); while the third of them is found (though a fancy of the hour) to be framed upon real dialectical principles. But dialectic is not rhetoric; nothing on that subject is to be found in the endless treatises of rhetoric, however prolific in hard names. When Plato has sufficiently put them to the test of ridicule ...
— Phaedrus • Plato
... Abiram) is a familiar and old-attested name meaning "(my) father is exalted''; the meaning of Abraham is obscure a,nd the explanation Gen. xvii. 3 is mere word-play. It is possible that raham was originally only a dialectical form of ...
— Project Gutenberg Encyclopedia
... and surroundings are indicated, it is as an argument that the poem is mainly left to exist. The bearing of this argument on contemporary theories may to some appear a merit, to others a blemish. To make the dying John refute Strauss or Renan, handling their propositions with admirable dialectical skill, is certainly, on the face of it, somewhat hazardous. But I can see no real incongruity in imputing to the seer of Patmos a prophetic insight into the future, no real inconsequence in imagining the opponent of Cerinthus spending his last breath in the defence of Christian truth ...
— An Introduction to the Study of Browning • Arthur Symons
... can hardly be distinguished, and their languages differ less one from the other than the Portuguese differs from the Spanish. Our Korak interpreters found very little difficulty in conversing with Chukchis; and a comparison of vocabularies which we afterward made showed only a slight dialectical variation, which could be easily accounted for by a few centuries of separation. None of the Siberian languages with which I am acquainted are written, and, lacking a fixed standard of reference, they change ...
— Tent Life in Siberia • George Kennan
... and was sure that the dream would come true; and moreover, that he did not very much care if they did, or if he ever got back alive; "for it was better to die than be made an ape, and a scarecrow, and laughed at by the men, and badgered with Ramus his logic, and Plato his dialectical devilries, to confess himself a Manichee, and, for aught he knew, a turbaned Turk, or Hebrew Jew," and so flung into the boat like ...
— Westward Ho! • Charles Kingsley
... Fallacy of Many Questions ([Greek: t t do rotmata n poien]) is a deceptive form of interrogation, when a single answer is demanded to what is not really a single question. In dialectical discussions the respondent was limited to a simple 'yes' or 'no'; and in this fallacy the question is so framed as that either answer would seem to imply the acceptance of a proposition which would be repudiated. ...
— Deductive Logic • St. George Stock
... types deserved to be particularly noticed. It is as though the Italian nation at this epoch, suffocated by Spanish etiquette and poisoned by Jesuitical hypocrisy, sought to expand healthy lungs in free spaces of open air, indulging in dialectical niceties and immortalizing street jokes by the genius ...
— Some Forerunners of Italian Opera • William James Henderson |
