It is a key feature of the Babylonian Talmud that its dialectic seems most often to be there for its own sake, that even the attempt to achieve truth through logical procedure has been abandoned (or transcended) in favour of the pure spiritual activity of the discussion itself. Moreover, as has been frequently noted, anything that would suggest the arrival at a conclusion in the Babylonian Talmud is most often refuted and rejected and the dialectics almost always end up unresolved, while in the Palestinian Talmud such resolution is the order of the day. I would place the two Talmuds clearly in diachronic relation. The Palestinian Talmud was redacted, on all accounts, in the third quarter of the fourth century or so, the Babylonian Talmud at least two centuries later. It makes sense, at least heuristically, to regard the Palestinian Talmud as something like what the Babylonian Talmud looked like in the fourth century as well and to isolate the work of the stammaim through this comparison. I mean to carry out comparative work of this sort elsewhere, especially insofar as it is crucial for understanding the place of dialogue in the Talmud, the main focus of the project as a whole. For the meantime, the work of Christine Hayes is very instructive in helping us to understand this dissimilarity between the Talmuds.