 After Valla’s attack on what he calls the fundamenta (foundations) of Aristotelian-scholastic metaphysics and natural philosophy, he turns to dialectic in Books II and III of his Repastinatio. For Valla, argumentation should be approached from an oratorical rather than a logical point of view. What counts is whether an argument works, which means whether it convinces one’s adversary or public. The form of the argument is less important. Dialectic is a species of confirmation and refutation; and, as such, it is merely a component of invention, one of the five parts of rhetoric (Repastinatio, 1:175; 2:447; DD 2:3). Compared to rhetoric, dialectic is an easy subject and does not require much time to master, since it considers and uses only the syllogism “bare”, as Valla puts it, that is, in isolation from its wider argumentative context; its sole aim is to teach. The rhetorician, on the other hand, uses not only the syllogism, but also the enthymeme (incomplete syllogism), epicheireme (a kind of extended reasoning) and example. The orator has to clothe everything in persuasive arguments, since his task is not only to teach but also to please and to move. This leads Valla to downplay the importance of the Aristotelian syllogism and to consider forms of argumentation that are not easily forced into its straightjacket. Among these are captious forms of reasoning such as the dilemma, paradox, and heap argument (sorites), and Valla offers an interesting analysis of these forms in the last book of the Repastinatio.