Dialectic
A philosophical method of reasoning through opposition and resolution, most associated with Hegel's account of the development of thought and history.
Dialectic names a family of philosophical methods that proceed by the working through of contradictions. The earliest sense, in Plato, is the practice of philosophical conversation by question and answer — the elenchus that exposes contradictions in what an interlocutor takes himself to know. Aristotle systematized the technique as a method of argument from probable premises.
The most influential modern sense is Hegel's. For Hegel, dialectic is not merely a method of argument but the structure of reality itself: every concept generates its own opposition, and the tension between them is resolved at a higher level of comprehension that preserves what is true in both. The pattern is sometimes summarized as thesis–antithesis–synthesis, though Hegel himself did not use those terms in this triadic form. Marx inverted Hegelian dialectic into a dialectic of material productive forces and relations of production — the historical materialism that became the methodological core of Marxist social theory.