The Dialectic (Greek: ) is a line of thought, originating in ancient Greek philosophy, that stresses development through a back and

forth movement between opposing propositions. It thus stands in stark contrast to Western philosophys general emphasis on the permanence of being. The dialectic movement refers either to a mental process or to a process believed to occur in objective reality. When the dialectic movement is seen as occurring in the mind, as in the Socratic dialectic, it essentially means a process by which a person gradually comes to reach a certain insight. That understanding of the dialectic is generally compatible with traditional ontology and its focus on eternal being (for example, the Platonic ideas). When the dialectic is seen as a movement inherent to objective reality, it has frequently implied a conflicting development, as in Marxism, rather than a harmonious type of development, as the fundamental characteristic of reality. In appreciating the dialectic, one question is whether it over-emphasizes the role of conflict in development. In Eastern worldviews such as Daoism, development occurs through harmonious interaction of natural polarities, such as male and female. Conflict in nature may also beget development, but acting in a different way. This same confusion has pervaded concepts of the dialectic in philosophy, particularly in Marxism. Nature of dialectic Expressed in everyday language, the idea of the dialectic implies a movement of back and forth similar to slalom in skiing. The movement goes right, then left, then right again, and so on, but the overall direction is straight ahead. Broadly defined in philosophical language, the dialectic is an exchange of propositions (theses) and counter-propositions (antitheses) resulting in a synthesis of the opposing assertions, or at least a qualitative transformation in the direction of the dialogue or progress. .
Syllogism / logic method A syllogism is a type of formal logical argument. Syllogisms come in three sentences, each with a subject and predicate: Major Premise: Subject, predicate Minor Premise: Subject, predicate Conclusion: Subject, predicate The major premise is the first premise in a syllogism and contains both major term and the middle term. The major term is the predicate term of the conclusion and the middle term is the term that occurs in both premises, but not in the conclusion.

The minor premise is the second premise in a syllogism and contains both the minor term and the middle term. The minor term is the subject term of the conclusion.

methodic doubt, in Cartesian philosophy, a way of searching for certainty by systematically though tentatively doubting everything. First, all statements are classified according to type and source of knowledgee.g., knowledge from tradition, empirical knowledge, and mathematical knowledge. Then, examples from each class are examined. If a way can be found to doubt the truth of any statement, then all other statements of that type are also set aside as dubitable. The doubt is methodic because it assures systematic completeness, but also because no claim is made that allor even that anystatements in a dubitable class are really false or that one must or can distrust them in an ordinary sense. The method is to set aside as conceivably false all statements and types of knowledge that are not indubitably true. The hope is that, by eliminating all statements and types of knowledge the truth of which can be doubted in any way, one will find some indubitable certainties.

Bacon's main interest for philosophers lay in his philosophy of science. This was to come in two parts. First, a radical criticism of the Scholastic and Renaissance approach to science would be needed to wipe away the confusions of the past. Second, a methodology would be needed to put science back on a sound footing. He called his project to reform the sciences the Great Instauration, which meant restoration or renewal. In fact, he completed only the first of three parts, called the New Organon, which refers to Aristotle's logical works, known collectively as the Organon. The first part of Bacon's philosophical project focused on sweeping away what he considered to be past errors in philosophy. Bacon's attitude toward what had gone before can be summed up in a set of similes. Bacon took issue with the metaphysicians and the empirics, such as alchemists and scientists. He termed the metaphysicians spiders. Like spiders, the \metaphysicians spun beautiful and ingenious webs, produced purely from within themselves. The empirics were like ants, scrambling about and collecting quantities of material, and piling them up, without making anything new of them. Instead of being spiders and ants, people should be more like bees working together not only to collect but to transform what they've gathered. Scientists should interpret the data that arises from experience, should carry out experiments to collect new data, and so slowly build up humankind's knowledge of the world. //Bacon insisted that progress in science depended upon starting from scratch: It is idle //to expect any great advancement in science from the super inducing and engrafting of //new things upon old. We must begin anew from the very foundations, unless we would //revolve for ever in a circle with mean and contemptible progress. These similes point out the culprits that Bacon viewed as stymieing the advance of human knowledge. More specifically, his targets were two philosophers who by Bacon's

time had cast enormous shadows for nearly two millennia: Plato and Aristotle. Bacon was critical of two schools of thought that had emerged from Platonism and Aristotelianism, respectively. He was opposed to the rationalist tendency, inherent in Plato, that knowledge could be attained by examining the content and meaning of words. This tendency was found not only in Plato himself who was always concerned with finding precise meanings of terms like justice, goodness, and love, but also in rationalists under Plato's influence, like Anselm. Anselm (as discussed in Chapter 7) thought that by simply defining a supreme being as a being than that which none greater can be thought you can know that such a being exists. Bacon descried this as a spidery tendency to spin something from one's own mind. He also made attacks on Aristotle, the other giant of the classical period. Aristotle was a naturalist, a biologist who studied more than 500 species in order to note their tendencies for change and growth. To Bacon this was a useless enterprise, since Aristotle was intent upon amassing data but could not arrive at any scientific hypotheses. Bacon thought that there must be a new way of collating and organizing data that would help generate inductive hypotheses. Further, Bacon thought that Aristotle was only strong for disputations and contentions, but barren of the production of works for the benefit of the life of man, according to his biographer, William Rawley.