In this chapter, I continue to follow the manner in which Alfarabi describes the historical development of scientific awareness out of the murky depths of pre-scientific activity. Towards the peak of this development is the emergence and elaboration of the dialectical art, whose uses for science is Alfarabi's special concern in what follows. Dialectic is the method to the fundamental premises of all science. For instance, the Organon itself culminates in the Topics. Even if we regard the Posterior Analytics as the supreme analytical art, we cannot help but notice the way in which Aristotle carefully points out the ultimately hypothetical character of science (episteēmeē). Because of what may be described as the hypothetical character of scientific knowledge––that is, due to the fact that so much depends on the investigator's conviction regarding the truth of those first principles that provide the foundation of science––there will be those, according to Aristotle and Alfarabi, who deny the very possibility of scientific knowledge. The difficult problems that emerge over the status of scientific knowledge force us to confront the issue concerning the proper starting points (archai) or principles from which a syllogism proceeds but which are not reached by syllogism.

The dialectical art which Alfarabi outlines in the Book of Dialectic addresses the reigning confusion surrounding the context theory, which refers to the form of Aristotle’s Organon inherited by the medieval Arab philosophers from an earlier Alexandrian tradition. I argue that Alfarabi intended to recover an understanding of science, dialectic, rhetoric, sophistry and poetics that is Platonic or Socratic in nature. Instead of (like Aristotle) understanding science, dialectic, rhetoric, sophistics and poetics as separate and somewhat exclusive compartments within the greater philosophic or scientific enterprise, Alfarabi’s considered view of science precluded such a radical sort of division. The “context theory” should then be viewed as simply a modern, shorthand way of confronting the Platonic correction of the more common ordering of the arts of logos. For the philosopher as dialectician is much too cognizant of those basic prerequisites of philosophizing (to which he must constantly return) to permit him to rest satisfied with any overly technical framework that does not do justice to those conditions. I will insist that the Alfarabi that emerges here is not a typical Platonist: he is a Socratic or rather a philosopher in that sense of the term.

In this chapter, I examine how the art of dialectic might be used to resolve (or at least bring to light) the ‘perplexities’ that surround Aristotle’s presentation of the natural world. Contemporary scholars have noticed the strange fact that Aristotle’s procedure in the Physics resembles not so much the strict progression of demonstrative proof as outlined in the Posterior Analytics but, instead, the dialectical method described in the Topics. This accords with Maimonides’ claim in the Guide of the Perplexed that Aristotle was aware of the fact that the level of argumentation in Physics and De Caelo is less than demonstrative. Now, if it is the case, as Maimonides stresses in the Guide, that the ‘true perplexity’ concerns the incompatibility of Aristotelian physics and Ptolemaic astronomy, and if Aristotelian physics has been presented in dialectical form, how might dialectic be used to resolve this most profound perplexity?

If, as I have suggested from the outset, Alfarabi’s Book of Dialectic is meant to portray the very dialectical education it describes, what precisely is the student of the book to have learned by the time he or she has finished it? In order to help clarify this matter, I seek help from the commentaries on the Metaphysics by Alexander of Aphrodisias. Alexander's attentiveness to ‘form’ or formal causality in these writings points to the reason why Alfarabi's treatment of the Topics is at the same time a consideration of Platonic politics and Socrates’ famous ‘turn’ to the logos: Socrates’ dialectical method was meant to be a correction of the method of his predecessors. Just as in Chapter Three I point to the way in which Alfarabi's dialectic considers nothing less than the question concerning the creation or eternity of the world, here I take up the manner in which his treatment of the various interrogative particles (and especially the particle ma, or “what is”) is intended to point to its proper resolution. The education to which the Jadal is leading has, in the end, not a little to do with the knowledge of the essential limitations to any such resolution.

The first matter to which the reader of the Book of Dialectic must attend is the fact that Alfarabi appears to offer two distinct starting points to his commentary. The first starting point, as we will have witnessed in Chapter One, begins at something of a technical height, with Alfarabi assuming a sophisticated level of learning on the part of those he is addressing. In Chapter Two, I consider the nature of the subsequent or ‘corrected’ starting point, which mimics the Aristotle of the Philosophy of Aristotle to the extent to which Alfarabi here begins from a more obviously commonsensical position. This is at the same time, then, to recall Alfarabi’s Plato and also (and above all) his Socrates. Because the new starting point is the recollection of the pre-scientific beginnings of science, which are themselves rarely subjected to scientific scrutiny, the role of the Law in instilling decent habits comes to the fore. We are then forced to consider the character of the kind of political science that is responsible for the creation of that Law in the first place.

The introduction concerns my division of the entire Arabic text and a brief discussion of the ways in which the various parts of the discussion fit into the larger whole. It groups the numerous divisions into parts and explains why my commentary will consider the parts in a specific order. It also offers a brief biography of Alfarabi including notes on his intellectual successors, a survey of historical reports concerning the ways in which his expansive body of work was received, in addition to a brief treatment of the art of dialectic as it was depicted by Plato’s Socrates and Aristotle.

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