Abstract

In Platonism, a gulf between inquiry and knowledge, between discursive and noetic thinking, between fallibility and infallibility is always looming. The same - or related - gulf has sometimes been read inside the conception of dialectic: is dialectic a procedure and a method, or perhaps the aim or the final stage of this method in which there is no longer room for error?

Plotinus short and incredibly condensed treatise On Dialectic I.3. would seem to separate these conceptions explicitly, and offers some ideas on what kinds of operations help moving from the former to the latter one. I will argue that he uses the term broadly, for operations that deal with even individuals and sensible items, and that his aim to lay out a procedure that helps arriving in dialectic understood narrowly.

The gap does not disappear after working out Plotinus literary references, influences, and motivations, but it comes our significantly smaller than initially appeared. Ideal epistemology, then, does not need to mean that there is no interest and work put into thinking about inquiry and early phases of knowledge acquisition.