Dialectic

Dialectic, also known as the dialectical method, refers originally to dialogue between people holding different points of view about a subject but wishing to arrive at the truth through reasoned argument. Dialectic resembles debate, but the concept excludes subjective elements such as emotional appeal and rhetoric; the object is more an eventual and commonly-held truth than the 'winning' of an competition. It has its origins in ancient philosophy and continued to be developed in the Middle Ages.
Hegelianism refigured "dialectic" to no longer refer to a literal dialogue. Instead, the term takes on the specialized meaning of development by way of overcoming internal contradictions. Dialectical materialism, a theory advanced by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, adapted the Hegelian dialectic into a materialist theory of history. The legacy of Hegelian and Marxian dialectics has been criticized by philosophers, such as Karl Popper and Mario Bunge, who considered it unscientific.
Dialectic implies a developmental process and so does not fit naturally within classical logic. Nevertheless, some twentieth-century logicians have attempted to formalize it.

Classical philosophy

In classical philosophy, dialectic is a form of reasoning based upon dialogue of arguments and counter-arguments, advocating propositions and counter-propositions. The outcome of such a dialectic might be the refutation of a relevant proposition, or a synthesis, a combination of the opposing assertions, or a qualitative improvement of the dialogue. Socrates has become famous for his Socratic method of questioning conversation partners on topics until they agreed with him or admitted ignorance.

Platonism

In Platonism, dialectic assumed an ontological and metaphysical role in that it became the process whereby the intellect passes from sensibles to intelligibles, rising from idea to idea until it finally grasps the supreme idea, the first principle which is the origin of all. The philosopher is consequently a "dialectician". In this sense, dialectic is a process of inquiry that does away with hypotheses up to the first principle. It slowly embraces multiplicity in unity. The philosopher Simon Blackburn wrote that the dialectic in this sense is used to understand "the total process of enlightenment, whereby the philosopher is educated so as to achieve knowledge of the supreme good, the Form of the Good".

Aristotle

has been traditionally understood as viewing dialectic as a lesser method of reasoning than demonstration, which derives a necessarily true conclusion, from premises assumed to be true, via syllogism. Within the Organon, the series comprising Aristotle's works about logic, the Topics is dedicated to dialectic—which he characterizes as argument from endoxa where positions are subject to lines of questioning, to which concessions may be made in response. While Aristotle asserts "dialectic does not prove anything", he considers it to be a useful art closely related to rhetoric.

Medieval philosophy

In the medieval period, dialectic was a foundational element of the trivium, the essential curriculum in arts faculties at early universities. Drawing heavily on the works of Aristotle, as transmitted and commented upon by figures like Boethius, medieval thinkers employed dialectic as a rigorous method for analyzing texts and pursuing truth through reasoned argumentation. This practice was most notably formalized in the academic exercise known as the quaestio disputata, a structured public debate where scholars presented arguments for and against a specific proposition drawn from authoritative sources such as Scripture, Church Fathers, or classical philosophers. The goal was not merely to win a debate but to use logical analysis to resolve apparent contradictions between different authorities, reconcile faith with reason, and arrive at a unified, deeper understanding of the subject matter. This method of systematic inquiry and rigorous logical consistency formed the bedrock of Scholasticism and the Western intellectual tradition, laying the groundwork for later developments in modern philosophy and science.
Following Boethius, who drew heavily on Aristotle, many scholastic philosophers made use of dialectics in their works, including Peter Abelard, William of Sherwood, Garlandus Compotista, Walter Burley, Roger Swyneshed, William of Ockham, and Thomas Aquinas.
This dialectic was formed as follows:

The question to be determined ;
A provisory answer to the question ;
The principal arguments in favor of the provisory answer;
An argument against the provisory answer, traditionally a single argument from authority ;
The determination of the question after weighing the evidence ;
The replies to each of the initial objections.
Modern philosophy

The concept of dialectics was given new life at the start of the nineteenth century by Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, whose dialectical model of nature and of history made dialectics a fundamental aspect of reality, instead of regarding the contradictions into which dialectics leads as evidence of the limits of pure reason, as Immanuel Kant had argued. Hegel was influenced by Johann Gottlieb Fichte's conception of synthesis, although Hegel didn't adopt Fichte's thesis–antithesis–synthesis language except to describe Kant's philosophy: rather, Hegel argued that such language was "a lifeless schema" imposed on various contents, whereas he saw his own dialectic as flowing out of "the inner life and self-movement" of the content itself.
In the mid-nineteenth century, Hegelian dialectic was appropriated by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels and retooled in what they considered to be a nonidealistic manner. It would also become a crucial part of later representations of Marxism as a philosophy of dialectical materialism. These representations often contrasted dramatically and led to vigorous debate among different Marxist groups.

Hegelian dialectic

The Hegelian dialectic describes changes in the forms of thought through their own internal contradictions into concrete forms that overcome previous oppositions.
This dialectic is sometimes presented in a threefold manner, as first stated by Heinrich Moritz Chalybäus, as comprising three dialectical stages of development: a thesis, giving rise to its reaction; an antithesis, which contradicts or negates the thesis; and the tension between the two being resolved by means of a synthesis. However, Hegel opposed these terms.
By contrast, the terms abstract, negative, and concrete suggest a flaw or an incompleteness in any initial thesis. For Hegel, the concrete must always pass through the phase of the negative, that is, mediation. This is the essence of what is popularly called Hegelian dialectics.
To describe the activity of overcoming the negative, Hegel often used the term Aufheben, variously translated into English as 'sublation' or 'overcoming', to conceive of the working of the dialectic. Roughly, the term indicates preserving the true portion of an idea, thing, society, and so forth, while moving beyond its limitations. What is sublated, on the one hand, is overcome, but, on the other hand, is preserved and maintained.
As in the Socratic dialectic, Hegel claimed to proceed by making implicit contradictions explicit: each stage of the process is the product of contradictions inherent or implicit in the preceding stage. In his view, the purpose of dialectics is "to study things in their own being and movement and thus to demonstrate the finitude of the partial categories of understanding".
For Hegel, even history can be reconstructed as a unified dialectic, the major stages of which chart a progression from self-alienation as servitude to self-unification and realization as the rational constitutional state of free and equal citizens.

Marxist dialectic

Marxist dialectic is a form of Hegelian dialectic which applies to the study of historical materialism. Marxist dialectic is thus a method by which one can examine social and economic behaviors. It is the foundation of the philosophy of dialectical materialism, which forms the basis of historical materialism.
In the Marxist tradition, "dialectic" refers to regular and mutual relationships, interactions, and processes in nature, society, and human thought.
A dialectical relationship is a relationship in which two phenomena or ideas mutually impact each other, leading to development and negation. Development refers to the change and motion of phenomena and ideas from less advanced to more advanced or from less complete to more complete. Dialectical negation refers to a stage of development in which a contradiction between two previous subjects gives rise to a new subject. In the Marxist view, dialectical negation is never an endpoint, but instead creates new conditions for further development and negation.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, writing several decades after Hegel's death, proposed that Hegel's dialectic is too abstract. Against this, Marx presented his own dialectic method, which he claimed to be "direct opposite" of Hegel's method.
Marxist dialectics is exemplified in Das Kapital. As Marx explained,
Class struggle is the primary contradiction to be resolved by Marxist dialectics because of its central role in the social and political lives of a society. Nonetheless, Marx and Marxists developed the concept of class struggle to comprehend the dialectical contradictions between mental and manual labor and between town and country. Hence, philosophic contradiction is central to the development of dialectics: the progress from quantity to quality, the acceleration of gradual social change; the negation of the initial development of the status quo; the negation of that negation; and the high-level recurrence of features of the original status quo.
Friedrich Engels further proposed that nature itself is dialectical, and that this is "a very simple process, which is taking place everywhere and every day". His dialectical "law of the transformation of quantity into quality and vice versa" corresponds, according to Christian Fuchs, to the concept of phase transition and anticipated the concept of emergence "a hundred years ahead of his time". Stalin and Mao interpreted the transformation of quantity into quality not as a separate law, but as a special instance of the unity and struggle of opposites.
For Vladimir Lenin, the primary feature of Marx's "dialectical materialism" is its application of materialist philosophy to history and social sciences. Lenin's main contribution to the philosophy of dialectical materialism is his theory of reflection, which presents human consciousness as a dynamic reflection of the objective material world that fully shapes its contents and structure.
Later, Stalin's works on the subject established a rigid and formalistic division of Marxist–Leninist theory into dialectical materialism and historical materialism. While the first was supposed to be the key method and theory of the philosophy of nature, the second was the Soviet version of the philosophy of history.
Soviet systems theory pioneer Alexander Bogdanov viewed Hegelian and materialist dialectic as progressive, albeit inexact and diffuse, attempts at achieving what he called tektology, or a universal science of organization.