Plato's Crito examines a single moral decision, whether Socrates ought to escape from his death-cell. Stokes' book discusses Socrates' arguments against Crito's offer of escape. It construes Socrates' questions as genuine questions, which clarify and undermine Crito's positions. Stokes's approach avoids the 'documentary fallacy'; it shows how Plato catered for both the novice and the experienced reader of his published works. This book offers a fresh account of Socrates' whole strategy. It demonstrates both the shakiness of Socrates' persuasion of the un-philosophical Crito to engage in dialectic, and the coherence of his substantive confutation. Plato's reasoning emerges from Stokes' study with more credit than many have given it.

The period from Plato's birth to Aristotle's death (427–322 BC) is one of the most influential and formative in the history of Western philosophy. The developments of logic, metaphysics, epistemology, ethics and science in this period have been investigated, controversies have arisen and many new theories have been produced. But this is the first book to give detailed scholarly attention to the development of dialectic during this decisive period. It includes chapters on topics such as: dialectic as interpersonal debate between a questioner and a respondent; dialectic and the dialogue form; dialectical methodology; the dialectical context of certain forms of arguments; the role of the respondent in guaranteeing good argument; dialectic and presentation of knowledge; the interrelations between written dialogues and spoken dialectic; and definition, induction and refutation from Plato to Aristotle. The book contributes to the history of philosophy and also to the contemporary debate about what philosophy is.

This book aims to contribute a single idea – a new way to interpret legal decisions in any field of law and in any capacity of interpreting law through a theory called legal dialects. This theory of the dialectical path of law uses the Hegelian dialectic which compares and contrasts two ideas, showing how they are concurrently the same but separate, without the original ideas losing their inherent and distinctive properties – what in Hegelian terms is referred to as the sublation. To demonstrate this theory, Lincoln takes different aspects of international tax law and corporate law, two fields that seem entirely contradictory, and shows how they are similar without disregarding their key theoretical properties. Primarily focusing on the technical rules of the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) approach to international tax law and the United States approach to tax law, Lincoln shows that both engage in the Hegelian dialectical approach to law.

"We need a philosophy of both history and spirit to deal with the problems we touch upon here. Yet we would be unduly rigorous if we were to wait for perfectly elaborated principles before speaking philosophically of politics." Thus Merleau-Ponty introduces Adventures of the Dialectic, his study of Marxist philosophy and thought. In this study, containing chapters on Weber, Lukacs, Lenin, Sartre, and Marx himself, Merleau-Ponty investigates and attempts to go beyond the dialectic.

A fresh reading of Dante's major literary works - the Divine Comedy and the Vita nuova - that combines central tenets of incarnational theology and dialectical thought to challenge a dominant paradigm in Dante criticism.

Dialectic: The Pulse of Freedom is now widely regarded as a classic of contemporary philosophy. Written by the renowned founder of the philosophy of critical realism, first published in 1993, this book sets itself three main aims: the development of a general theory of dialectic – of which Hegelian dialectic can be seen to be a special case; the dialectical enrichment and deepening of critical realism – into the system of dialectical critical realism; and the outline of the elements of a totalizing critique of Western philosophy.

This study focuses on Laches, Protagoras, and the conversation between Socrates and Agathon in the Symposium. For these dialogues the author "proposes a strategy of interpretation that insists on the dialogues' essentially interrogatory character. . . . Stokes argues that we are not entitled to ascribea thesis to Socrates (far less to Plato) unless he unambiguously asserts it as his own belief. . . . For the most part, Stokes argues, Socrates is doing what he claims to be doing: cross-examining his interlocutor. He draws the materials of his own argument from the respondent's explicit admissions and from his own knowledge of the respondent's character, commitments and ways of life.What is shown by such a procedure is not, . . . [according to Stokes], that acertain thesis is true or false, but, rather, that a certain sort of person, with certain commitments, can be led, on pain of inconsistency, to assent to theses that at first seem alien to him. Sometimes, as it turns out, these are theses that Socrates also endorses in his own person." Times Literary Supplement