Schopenhauer Arthur: Eristička dijalektika

Arthur Schopenhauer: Eristic Dialectic

The art of always being right explained in 38 tricks

The text in this book is from Schopenhauer's legacy and was supposed to be a template for lectures. However, we know that the only lecture that Schopenhauer gave was the one that earned him the right to teach as a private assistant professor at the University of Berlin. After that, he announced lectures for a long time, but that was all.

Eristic dialectic was printed and read mainly for its manifesto content, for instructions on how to skillfully argue and win debates, advice on what techniques we can apply, which, of course, attracts many. The instructions on what interventions to use are not an exposition of philosophical truths, on the contrary, Schopenhauer repeatedly emphasizes that the truth or falsity of an attitude is not what he is dealing with, but is solely about the effectiveness of the intervention. Instructions for argumentation are not instructions for the general world of competition, but only highlighting one possible approach to the use of reason.
Nadežda Čačinovič

as a rule, a person will try to impose his claim even when it seems wrong or doubtful to him for a moment. Aids in this are provided by each one's own clarity and weakness; this is shown by the daily experience of discussion: everyone has his own natural dialectic just as he has his own natural logic. The only thing is that natural dialectics by no means guides us as reliably as natural logic. Hardly anyone will think or conclude against the laws of logic: there are many wrong claims, and wrong conclusions are rare.

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One should extend the opponent's claim beyond its natural limits, interpret it as generally as possible, understand it in the widest possible sense and exaggerate it; but one's own claim, on the other hand, should be narrowed down as much as possible, reduced to the narrowest possible limits: because the more general a claim is, the more exposed it is to numerous attacks.

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788, Danzig – 1860, Frankfurt) was a German philosopher. From 1820, he worked as a private assistant professor at the University of Berlin, but soon, due to disagreements with Hegel, he stopped teaching. From 1832 he lived in Frankfurt, where he worked as a private teacher.
Critically continuing the philosophy of classical German idealism, he built an original and unique doctrine that includes epistemology, metaphysics, aesthetics and ethics, and is called the philosophy of pessimism. According to Schopenhauer's philosophy, man's life is nothing but endless suffering and a series of defeats, therefore this world is the worst of all possible worlds, and ethical meaning can only be found in compassion and helping others.
His most significant works are The World as Will and Image, On Sight and Colors, On Will in Nature, Parerga and Paralipomena, Two fundamental problems of ethics and Eristic dialectics.