ABSTRACT
India is the birthplace of dialectical thinking in our world—or it is the first written record of such a form of philosophical and critical thinking. Dialectics means many things, to many different people. The ontology of flux is relatively uncontroversial as nearly everyone would agree that change is constantly taking place in some form—‘one can never step into same river twice’ as the old saying of Heraclitus reminds people. The key aspect of dialectics is that it places reality as flux at the forefront of its analysis. The methods of dialogue are also relatively straight forward. In the Western canon this method is best known through Plato’s dialogues that involve the method of Elenchus. Dialectical thinking is not particular or unique to any civilisation but emerged across a range of civilisations during the Axial Age, albeit in ways that differ in terms of emphasis according to the social problems that this form of critical thinking was directed.
