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.

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.

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