Plato

Dialectic: The coping stone of knowledge and education.

book VII 533,

-The dialectical method alone proceeds in this way, destroying its hypotheses to get to the first principle

of all and make itself secure.It finds the eye of the soul embedded in what is really a swamp of

barbarism and gently draws and raises it upwards, using the arts which we have enumerated

as handmaids in the work of conversion. These we have often from force of habit called

knowledge,but they need another name, implying more brightness than belief, and more obscurity

than knowledge.-

-But will words which manifest somehow the quality of clear speaking in the soul be enough?-

-

[Dialectic. the word now describes the mastery of a metaphysical doctrine rather

than practice of a committal method.]

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