Plato’s philosophical method: a unified interpretation of dialectic in the Phaedrus

Abstract

What is Plato’s view concerning philosophical method? Plato thought that we should philosophize by using dialectic. The “progressive” interpretation of Plato’s dialectic holds that the word ‘Dialectic’ is an umbrella term to cover three distinct philosophical methods, namely, the method of elenchus, the method of hypothesis and the method of collection and division. Yet this interpretation leads to an unfruitful disagreement over Plato’s view of dialectic that clouds our understanding of Plato’s metaphilosophy. The goal of this paper is to outline a “unified” interpretation of Plato’s dialectic by arguing that Plato was committed in the Phaedrus to the view that dialectic is the method of finding correct definitions of “controversial words”, which articulates elenchus, hypothesis, and collection & division as dialectical procedures.

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