Presocratics
Plato
Kant
Hegel
Marx
As with many specialist words used by philosophers (such as “ideology” and “alienation”), “dialectic” has accumulated different meanings throughout time. Indeed, the linguistic history of “dialectic” curiously intersects with one of its meanings: historical change. Because the history of “dialectic” is complicated, we will limit the bulk of our discussion to three areas: 1) the origins of dialectical thinking in Ancient Greece; 2) “dialectic” as it was understood by the German Idealist …
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