Seminar: Steps toward Dialectical Logic [Fall 2025]

Among the many dense and difficult works of Aristotle—those most often left to the side, as it were, to be regarded as curious but perhaps only marginally helpful explorations—one finds his Topics. Many seem unsure (and not without reason) how to classify the work. Is it one of logic? Is it “dialectic”? Useful only, in truth, for rhetoric—the discovery and categorization of “[common]places”, τόποι?

The text and its animating idea of the dialectic—whatever that is in truth—aims at an understanding of “probable certainty”; but just what does that mean? Compounding this difficulty are the various historical traditions of its reception and interpretation.

But perhaps we can, through this seminar, begin to discover and clarify a forgotten tradition of inquiry. Such recovery seems important in a time of intellectual confusion and noise—a way of resolving conflict and disorder. To this end, an entry into thinking about “dialectical logic”, we will look at some of the best interpretations of the tradition: principally Yvan Pelletier’s Dialectique Aristotélicienne: Les principes clés des Topiques and some critical essays by Ambroise Gardeil and Timothée Richard (all translations to be provided by the instructor, Dr. Matthew K. Minerd).