/lit/ - Literature

>>18272107
I give you the Absolute.

>>17567138

>>14452833
Step 1: Know Kant really well.
Step 2: Know the transition from Kant to German Idealism decently well.
Step 3: Know Fichte and Schelling decently well.
Step 4: Read the Science of Logic instead of the Phenomenology of Spirit.
Tip: When you read some of these people, make sure not to bother trying to understand everything at once. Just suspend your disbelief/confusion and continue reading, and focus on the broader picture, the general structure of what's going on. When you're done, you'll know the basics you need to know.

>>14389218
The original concept in Plato was that of two people engaging in discourse, someone saying something, another person offering a counter-response, and them continuing until either resolution or unresolved perplexity. The Scholastics developed it into a more formalized practice of basically philosophical back-and-forth debate (focusing entirely on logical argument of course). So that's the form you see in Aquinas' Summa for example where he lays a claim, presents three or four objections, and then says "I answer that..." and responds. By Kant's time, dialectic as a practice just looked like the dedicated practice of proving whatever you wanted (so, eristic: winning a debate no matter what or how). That's why Kant saw it negatively. That being said, he retained the feature of two sides trying to prove opposing claims and suggested that since the objects of metaphysics (God, the world, the soul) aren't part of experience, then to use reason with respect to them will let us "prove" opposite claims. This is the idea of the antinomies of reason. That back-and-forth feature between positive claim, negative response, counter-response (modified and made better) became the important guiding concept when Fichte developed his philosophy, in which he thought reality itself is dialectical: it proceeds from something, to its sort of negation, and in the struggle to resolve it, produces a new movement, which then is still not fully unresolved, so it tries to resolve itself, etc, ad infinitum. He was the one to use the phrase thesis-antithesis-synthesis. The idea of a dialectic was preserved by Schelling and Hegel. In Hegel, the idea is that the third moment of the dialectical triad is the sublation of the first, but as before, dialectic in reality drives progress. This idea of dialectic in reality (where the negation of the negation is something new, seemingly violating the truth-functional principle of double negation, and thereby bivalence, and thereby excluded middle, and thereby non-contradiction) was preserved in Marx and Engels. Marx in Capital says stuff about the negation of the negation being something new, and Engels explicitly calls matter dialectical in its progression. Hope that helps.

>>14144617
>>14144627
I saved you from pic related. You have to know me in order to defeat me.