What is the difference between dialectic and logic?

Question

What is the difference between dialectic and logic? By dialectic, I mean what Plato employs in dialogues.

Thanks in advance!

Answer 1

The link between the two is strong.

The "dialectical method" (ἡ διαλεκτικὴ μέθοδος)was used by Plato in his dialogues as the central tool for philosophical inquiry; see Rep, 533c and see e.g. :

• Richard Robinson, Plato’s Earlier Dialectic, Clarendon Press (1941).

For Aristotle, Dialectical arguments are different from demonstrations in :

the character of their premises, not in their logical structure: whether an argument is a sullogismos [a demonstration] is only a matter of whether its conclusion results of necessity from its premises. The premises of demonstrations must be true and primary, that is, not only true but also prior to their conclusions in the way explained in the Posterior Analytics. The premises of dialectical deductions, by contrast, must be accepted (endoxos).

We can see also the Dialectical School :

a group of early Hellenistic philosophers that were loosely connected by philosophizing in the — Socratic — tradition of Eubulides of Miletus and by their interest in logical paradoxes, propositional logic and dialectical expertise. Its two best-known members, Diodorus Cronus and Philo the Logician (or Dialectician), made groundbreaking contributions to the development of theories of conditionals and modal logic.

Thus, we have here three different approaches :

• Plato : dialectic is the (philosophical) method

• Aristotle : dialectic is (sort of) formal logic

• Megarians : dialectic is logic.

Then we have to consider at least Hegel's dilectic; see :

• Ermanno Bencivenga, Hegel’s Dialectical Logic, Oxford University Press (2000).