Will the real Dr Dee please stand up? The mysterious Dr Dee/Dr Destiny/John Dee1 reveals his blog via the power of Technorati. Socrates_Reincarnate muses on his application of Hegel’s dialectic method.

The three fatal problems with Hegelian dialectics, of course, mirror each primary ingredient of the method. When a thesis is proposed, there is a danger to vulgarize any thesis into binary truth versus falsehood. When an antithesis is incorrectly defined, it is extremely easy to fall prey to the fallacy of the excluded middle; and when the cycle of thesis and antithesis promulgates, there is a dangerous tendency toward solipsism and argumentatum ad nauseum.

All this, of course, is propositioned on the underlying assumptions of the existence of Universal Truth and the universal validity of logic and rationality. The latter is quite patently false. And only logical absolutists would admit the former.

Given the lack of universal rationality, Schopenhauer2 trumps Hegel any day. Schopenhauer’s magnum opus, ironically, is far more readable than Hegel’s.

Footnotes
  1. Who is he? might you ask. Find out here:  [1] [2]↩
  2. A. Schopenhauer, The Art of Controversy. [Project Gutenberg] [University of Adelaide]↩