This chapter discusses noetic contemplation proper, that is, seeing Intellect as he sees himself by virtue of our vertical participation. We see the entire intelligible world, consisting of the Forms, and we see the unfolding of the Great Kinds, the highest of the Forms in it. Our contemplation of Intellect has an unfolding character, although this doesn’t mean that we see Intellect as being in time. Plotinus shows the limitations of our individual perspective on this and other cosmic principles in contemplation. We see both the unity and the multiplicity of Intellect but in a way that transcends dialectical, discursive, and conceptual thinking. Contemplation doesn’t abolish our ability to think discursively but rather enriches that ability. Dialectical search for the truth is harmonised with a direct, intuitive vision of Intellect. On the one hand, the vision is expressed through dialectic and, on the other, dialectic leads us to and strengthens our intuitive, noetic experience of reality. Philosophy and contemplation become two sides of the same life.

A growth point captures the moment of speaking, taking a first-person view. It is thought in language, imbued with mental/social energy, and unpacked into a sentence. It is not a translation of gesture into speech. It is a process of processes. One is the psychological predicate (a notion from Vygotsky), a differentiation of context for what is newsworthy, the growth point’s core meaning – the context reshaped into a field of equivalents to make the differentiation meaningful. The core meaning has dual semiosis – opposite semiotic modes – a global-synthetic gesture and analytics-segmented speech, synchronized and coexpressive of the core. The gesture phases foster the synchronization. Cohesive threads to other growth points (a “catchment”) enrich it. A dialectic provides the growth point’s unpacking – the gesture becoming the thesis, the coexpressive speech the antithesis. Jointly, they create the dialectic synthesis. The dialectic synthesis and the unpacking are the same summoned construction-plus-gesture. The growth point, its processes fulfilled, inhabits the speaker’s being, taking up a position in the world of meaning it has created (conception from Merleau-Ponty).

In Constitutional Identity, Gary Jacobsohn highlights the tension both within constitutional systems and between constitutions and societal norms (culture). In this essay, we explore the first tension and glance at the second. One objective of the essay is to enumerate a set of “disharmonies” that appear with some frequency within constitutions and, employing historical data, identify the constitutional systems that contain them. Appealing to formal logic, we develop a taxonomy that helps us understand the kinds of disharmonies on display; a taxonomy that points to their sources. The essay thus generalizes Jacobsohn’s notion of disharmony and extends his insights from a small set of cases that begin with the letter “I” to a larger set.

Ambrose of Milan’s pastoral project of ‘building up the faith’ (adstruere fidem), evident in his preaching, is exemplified best in his hymns. Relating this project to his suspicions about dialectic, I argue that the hymns aim less to ‘destroy’ through analysis than to ‘construct’ through compelling imagery and a programme of sensitisation. By comparing the presentation of Christ’s miracles in his Expositio on Luke and in his hymn for the Epiphany, ‘Illuminans Altissimus’, I show how Ambrose renders abstract, narrative, and conceptual claims by means of personal, concrete, and actualising exempla that present his congregation with objects for ‘real assent’ (in the words of John Henry Newman). Such an approach distinguishes Ambrose’s hymns from the verse compositions of his Latin-speaking contemporaries, Hilary of Poitiers and Augustine of Hippo.

This chapter examines the operation of dialogue and reciprocal exchange between the ST and the translator. Dialogue ensures that this relationship will always be incomplete, unfinished. By translational dialogue, one art extends the expressive capacities of another. The motor of dialogue is dialectics, and the chapter goes on to evaluate different versions of dialectical progression, while itself opting for a dialectic which releases a semanticity, as opposed to a semiology, a dialectic of participatory subjecthood. The chapter closes with an assessment of David Bohm’s vision of dialogue, since its concern with implicate and explicate orders lead into the chapter following. The chapter also contains indicative translations of Lamartine and Hugo.

Hegel dedicates ‘Teleology’ in his Logic to resolve Kant’s antinomies about causality: the third antinomy of reason and the antinomy of judgement. This chapter first connects these distinct Kantian antinomies. I argue that Hegel is right that the opposition of the causal concepts involved in them is substantially the same. I also advocate that Hegel is right too in supposing that for Kant the conflicting concepts remain opposed after the ‘solution’ to the different logical conflicts in the various Critiques is reached. I argue that, in contrast, Hegel’s own resolution tries to deliver a proper unification of these concepts.

Chapter 4 begins by exploring the productive tension that can exist between gestural articulation and formal continuity in Schubert’s music, and its affinity with Schubert’s paratactic forms which exploit unexpected disjunction as a formal premise. It focuses on the expositional interpolations in Schubert’s sonatas that exhibit characteristics normally associated with development sections. The three analytical case studies that follow have been chosen for their distinctive approach to this formal practice, and demonstrate its early stages of development in D36/i and D353/i as well as a mature example, D804/i. Three fundamental questions underline my analyses: first, in what sense do the interpolations in Schubert’s first-movement expositions function as development (D353/i); second, the question of whether or not synthesis of the formal dialectic is achieved (D36/i), and finally, what the implications of this are for the articulation of a lyrically conceived teleology (D804/i). This chapter also contains a methodological interlude wherein I define my extension of Edward T. Cone’s concept of stratification to Schubert’s music and its relevance to the sonatas.

The purpose of this chapter is to offer a sketch of the relation between rhetoric and dialectic as Cicero sees it, and to identify a problem internal to his account. Cicero argues at length in the Tusculan Disputations in favor of the idea that the good and wise person does not experience any form of emotional disturbance. That being so, how can one who signs up to the idea that emotional disturbance is ideally to be eliminated then in good conscience recommend a practice – namely, rhetoric – one of whose principal objectives is to arouse the emotions? There looks to be a clash here between the objective of the philosopher and that of the orator. I explore Cicero’s resources for tackling this tension, and suggest how his conception of the relation between rhetoric and dialectic may thereby illuminate some distinctive aspects of his philosophical approach.

This chapter formulates the basic problem addressed in this book: how to understand the complexity of argumentation, that is, how argument and communication are entangled in human activity. Polylogue is introduced as a simple yet perspicuous term for renewing and advancing inquiry of argumentation in complex communication. The fact that polylogue cannot be dismissed is evident in examples of managing disagreement under polylogical conditions both contemporary (e.g., social media platforms) and historical (e.g., establishing congressional representation for the newly formed US republic). While recognized in practice, however, polylogue is theoretically dismissed by an analytic strategy of dyadic reduction prominent across time in the study of argumentation and communication. Even the remarkable theoretical and methodological contributions of the twentieth-century revival of the study of argumentation as a communicative, situated practice, do not yet make a polylogical turn for understanding argumentation due to lingering commitments to a paradigmatic norm of dyadic interaction. However, much broader considerations of how argument happens stimulated by this revival provide starting points for a polylogical alternative.

This chapter exposes the received dyadic model of communication and then critically analyzes the presumptions of the model. This reductive model, which views communication as evolving from a basic unit of face-to-face dialogue between two people, has dominated understanding of communication from ancient dialectic to today’s speech act theory, conversation analysis, and argumentation theory – the disciplines discussed in the chapter. While the dyadic reduction has a long, important history in theorizing argumentation and communication – a history that is briefly recounted, going back to the dialectical roots of argumentation theory – the principle of reduction becomes unjustified reductionism that bypasses polylogical realities of argumentation and communication.

In New York 2140 by Kim Stanley Robinson (2017), the struggle between the oligarchy and the commons is posited as the genre of modern history, subsuming different instances under this synchronic form. The novel’s utopianism consists of the synthesis of such dialectical movements: between two kinds of revolution, a mass civil resistance and a conventional electoral capture; between past and future; between fictional and non-fiction genres. The revolutionary event in the novel becomes the radical recombination of the central themes of the near future as they play across the chasm of scale between individual and globe. The characters work as an allegorical assemblage, an interaction best understood in relation to the debate between symbol and allegory as it was inaugurated by the Romantics at the birth of capitalist modernity. However, the need to stabilise the macro structure in New York 2140 raises hard questions with regard to gender, race and class, which suggest the impossibility of finally resolving the tension between collective and individual. Equally, however, this tension is the generative dialectic that underlies the utopian impulse as it takes form in the genre of near-future revolution.

Pragmatist readings of Kierkegaard, like fideistic readings, treat the conceptual apparatus of faith as all neatly in place: All that’s missing is an act of will (i.e., something other than understanding) to execute the program. But what we actually find in Kierkegaard are new conceptual distinctions. The chapter argues that in The Sickness unto Death, the question of what it means to be a self is answered through a process of abstraction.  Rather than the text motivating us to do more, feel more, or commit more decisively (as we might expect from Kierkegaard), what we "experience" in The Sickness unto Death is an enumeration of conceptual distinctions that enable us to notice more, question more, and reason better – that is, to engage in the kinds of activities normally associated with traditional philosophy. It is argued that the minimal (i.e., “naked”) self described in this text is not something one can experience concretely but rather exists only for abstract reflection.