An Interview with Terry Eagleton

[alice wellintown]

 I first heard that head-standing bit in high school sociology class.  The
> teacher being a Thomist considered Marx's over emphasis on the material as
> plain wrong. Terry Eagleton plays Thomist a little in his new book--for the
> sake of explication--his Catholic upbringing he sez.  Thomas was convinced
> that ideas are Real and Eagleton wants to show that Literature is kind of
> Real too. He's mad at the postmodernists. I'm assuming--haven't got far in
> the book and may never.
>
> By the way, can't the dialectic method be applied to both universals and
> particulars?

Sure.

The method works like this: One asks questions and another provides
answers. The crux of the biscuit, as Zappa sez in Apostrophe, is that
one must work with the given answer. The dialectic method is, simply,
question and answer. So, if I am asking questions and you are
providing answers, we have, a dialogue or dialectic.

But the method may be applied, as it is in Marx, who, we may say, took
it from Hegel, applies it to a materialist Reality, rather than an
Essential one. The Greeks had it all done a long time ago. The
essential reality is, of course, Aristotle's.