The Art of Arts: transcendental dialectic in Early Modernity

Abstract

Since Greek antiquity, dialectic has been regarded, among other things, as the conversational method of question and answer that can discover both the truth of matters and the order of things. This paper traces a hope placed in dialectic to organize and hone the liberal arts as well as to serve as a spiritual techne. In Augustine’s extraordinary personification, dialectic is the sole discipline qualified to sit in judgment on others because it “knows what knowledge is.” I examine representations of dialectic through the early modern period as governing supervisor of humanistic fields, one that supposedly gives its practitioners warrant to see beyond human capacity — comprehensively and critically. While it has been well established that many Renaissance thinkers, despite their recognition of dialectic as useful intellectual training, lambasted sere Scholasticism, and that humanists such as Agricola and Valla attempted to subsume dialectic under rhetoric; yet there has been less attention paid to the tradition of quasi-religious faith in a certain art of logical reasoning that stems from Plato and continues into the early modern period in the genres of dialogue and disputation. Therefore, I also explore dialectic as a method of epistemic transcendence — of reaching, perhaps, divine knowledge — in the works of Pico della Mirandola, Giordano Bruno, and Thomas More.