system
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human
What's the distinction Hegel brings with his thesis, antithesis and synthesis, which means it is a new idea, when compared to Scholasticim's "Manifestatio et Concordancia", or "videtur quod non, sed contra" from Aquinas?

I read Erwin Panofsky's "Gothic Architecture and Scholasticism", and was struck by how similar Scholastic argumentation, particularly the reconciliation of two opposing ideas, was to Hegel's idea about thesis, antithesis and synthesis (or is it metathesis?)... Anyway.... What makes Hegel stand out here, when the idea, as I understand it, seems to be established many centuries before him?  


Thanks in advance.
gpt
Hegel isn't actually concerned with thesis-antithesis-synthesis; this is a common misconception. For Hegel, any stage of argumentation contains an 'antithesis' within it: that is to say, if we explicate a position to the maximum extent, the position will eventually negate itself. Hegel's revolutionary move is to negate this negation, and subsume it into a new position. What was a contradiction – a negative moment – in the first position becomes a positive moment in the next.

Describing this as 'thesis-antithesis-synthesis' is false because 'antithesis' suggests that the negation comes from outside, when (for Hegel), the exact opposite is true. Furthermore, 'synthesis' suggests the combination of two different positions, when Hegel is in fact interested in the subsuming of a position's negative moment into a newly formulated position.