ABSTRACT
Cicero's view of philosophic method questions the dogmatism of so rigid a disjunction and compels us to consider another possibility within the plurality of philosophic methods. In Cicero's philosophic dialogues as in his textbooks on rhetoric, every careful method of discourse was a composite of two moments: invention and judgment. In the histories, philosophic method owes its origins to Socrates and its occasion to the dogmatism of the sophists. The method of Socrates was returned to philosophic employment not to discover the probable, but to invent reasons which obviated any conclusions whatsoever. The antithetical method generated the debate, laying a negative cross-questioning or refutation against any assertion whatever, and constituting the properly philosophical treatment of any subject as an argument in which affirmative and negative positions were represented. Debate, moreover, provides a unification not only of the philosophic methodologies of the Platonists and of the Aristotelians, but of the methods of philosophy and those of rhetoric.
