here's what it consists of:

1. Preliminary: Logic and Dialectic.

some etymology: logizesthai vs dialegesthai, and what the role of logic vs dialectic has been semantically; nothing new here if you've read your diogenes laertius but who the fuck has? so this is interesting. also, some amusingly straight talk:

"Dialectic, then, need have nothing to do with truth, as little as the fencing master considers who is in the right when a dispute leads to a duel."

this is good stuff, and i mean that in the sincerest way: this is good straight-talk that leaves the smart reader in control of the irony adjuster. (you know, unlike your typical half-witted wannabe-machiavelli types.)

2. The Basis of All Dialectic.

if you're pressed for time, lazy, or not inclined to generally waste your life with stuff like this, this is a good place to stop. this is where, in best enlightenment fashion, schopenhauer starts to shine the bright miner's hat flashlight of his mind into the mystery of dialectic, and of course, the de rigueur way about it is by analysis, in the strict sense:

"Our opponent has stated a thesis, or we ourselves,—it is all one. There are two modes of refuting it, and two courses that we may pursue.

I. The modes are (1) ad rem, (2) ad hominem or ex concessis."

and then there are two courses for those two modes, and generally everything divides neatly into subcategories, until (and this is the keystone of analytical philosophy) you're so completely divorced from your subject matter that further analysis would be, well, beside the point.

3. Stratagems.

this is money.

dude lists and explains, in detail, the methods of refuting your opponent in dialectic (there are 38 of them). i'm not making this up. apparently there are thirty-eight ways to jab, dodge, parry, camouflage, annoy or obfuscate. and reading this catalogue makes you a better conversationalist much in the same way that memorizing the dewey decimal system makes you an author.

however, with all of his philosopher's arrogance, his concluding statements win me over. dude had an ego the size of hegel's System and an annoying presumption of superiority, but i think he was a gentleman at heart:

As a sharpening of wits, controversy is often, indeed, of mutual advantage, in order to correct one’s thoughts and awaken new views. But in learning and in mental power both disputants must be tolerably equal. If one of them lacks learning, he will fail to understand the other, as he is not on the same level with his antagonist. If he lacks mental power, he will be embittered, and led into dishonest tricks, and end by being rude.

"The only safe rule, therefore, is that which Aristotle mentions in the last chapter of his Topica: not to dispute with the first person you meet, but only with those of your acquaintance of whom you know that they possess sufficient intelligence and self-respect not to advance absurdities; to appeal to reason and not to authority, and to listen to reason and yield to it; and, finally, to cherish truth, to be willing to accept reason even from an opponent, and to be just enough to bear being proved to be in the wrong, should truth lie with him."