Matteo Giangrande

This paper provides an account of the evolution of the notion of comparatio in the main dialectical works of Valla, Agricola, and Vives. It highlights the elements of continuity and discontinuity and sheds light on the original contributions of Vives’s treatment. In Valla, Agricola and Vives, the notion of comparatio characterizes: a) the locus of the relation to another in the inventio method; b) the cognitive act through which one can grasp the relationships of similarity and difference between concepts; c) the epistemic method for weighing the degree of plausibility of probable arguments. The paper also shows how Vives enhances the role of comparatio within dialectical art. Firstly, he attributes a pre-eminent position to the locus of the comparatio by virtue of the transversality of its application to all the other loci. Secondly, he identifies the explanation of the key concept of syllogism in the act of compering two sentences with a third. Finally, he finds the essence of the disputatio in the method of comparing equally probable contradictory arguments. This can rightly be considered an innovative element of the Vivesian dialectical treatment with respect to the most advanced European humanist movement of the first decades of the sixteenth century.

In Lenin’s works, Dialectics means a) scientific method and b) historical process. Diverging from the metaphysical method and from the reactionary doctrinarianism of non-dialectical Socialists, Marxist materialist Dialectics is a critical and historical-concrete analysis of the living contradictions animating conflicts between social classes: an omnilateral reason, opposed to the eclectic unilaterality of formal logic. Dialectics as Marxist theory of knowledge identifies the causes of historical process in the conflicting unity of elements contradicting each others. Social evolution is not a gradual transformation from simple to complex: quite the contrary, the historical development of social life is dialectic, because it is driven by objective contradictions between classes, revolutionary leaps, and laws conditioning the individual way of being.