Abstract

The philosopher is not satisfied with commonly accepted opinions and seeks a truth to which these opinions do not do justice. As a result the philosopher cannot talk about virtue and the good life in the way that the man on the street would. Yet philosophy thereby stands in danger of severing all of its ties with everyday experience and of deluding itself into thinking that it can be a purely "technical" discipline or a "science" which will grasp once and for all those truths which appear only "through a glass darkly" in our ordinary lives. But can philosophy give up its pretensions to being a "science" without simply falling back into the ambiguous, emotive, "relative" and disconnected utterances of ordinary conversation? In this dissertation I argue that dialectic as practised and discussed in Plato's early and middle dialogues is precisely a method which transcends everyday discourse while at the same time avoiding sophistic discourse, i.e., discourse which through the interchange of technical terms and general definitions gives itself the appearance of being "scientific". ;Through detailed interpretations of specific dialogues I show that the knowledge sought by dialectic is non-propositional and yet is attainable only through the actual process of examining and refuting propositions. In this way the dialectician both rises above the vague intuitions of ordinary experience and also does not think that the truth he seeks can be contained in an "ideal language" or in a "tight argument" or in an apt metaphor. What the "know-how" of dialectic provides is insight or understanding rather than any form of propositional certainty. In the middle dialogues an alternative method is introduced capable of providing propositional results: the method of hypothesis. I argue, however, that this method is always seen as a second best to the dialectic which "destroys hypotheses" in awakening knowledge which cannot be expressed in a proposition. A translation and interpretation of the "philosophical digression" of the Seventh Letter helps bring together in conclusion the main features of dialectic