The Oldest Idea in Philosophy

Socrates did philosophy in public. In the agora of Athens he questioned anyone who would talk with him about what they claimed to know, testing each confident claim against its own consequences. Often both parties discovered they understood less than they had believed, and that discovery was the point. Socrates held that the unexamined life is not worth living, and he treated argument as the instrument of that examination. He also drew a sharp line between his practice and that of the sophists, who taught argument as a technique for winning regardless of the truth.

In practiceCross-examination sits at the heart of every SuperDebate. Ten of its thirty-two minutes are debaters questioning each other directly, and the purpose is to clarify, not to trap.

Early in Plato's Republic, Glaucon and Adeimantus are unsatisfied with how quickly an argument against justice has been dismissed. So they restate it themselves, as powerfully as they can, not because they believe it, but because they want to see justice defended against the best case that can be made against it. It is among the earliest recorded examples of what we now call steelmanning.

In practiceWe ask every debater to answer the strongest version of the other side, and we prepare both sides so that each arrives at full strength.

Aristotle gave the tradition its systematic form. In the Topics, he describes dialectic as useful for training the mind, for engaging others on their own terms and for philosophy itself, because working through the difficulties on both sides of a question helps us see where truth and error lie. In the Rhetoric, he argues that we should be able to make the case for either side, not to persuade anyone of what is wrong, but to understand how the matter really stands and to answer an unfair argument when we meet one.

In practiceSwitch-side debate, arguing whichever side you are given, is how debaters train, and it shapes how our clubs practice.

The tradition did not end in Athens. Medieval scholars organized their inquiries by stating the strongest objections to their own conclusions before answering them. John Stuart Mill wrote in 1859:

“He who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that.”

John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (1859)

Modern competitive debate kept the practice alive by asking students to argue the side they were assigned rather than the side they preferred.

SuperDebate's founder came to philosophy through competitive debate, and we see the company as an heir to this lineage. What is new is the setting. Some of our evenings take an explicitly agora-style form, a roundtable in which each speaker answers the last and the audience joins in. All of them aim to carry this inheritance out of the seminar room and back into the public square where Socrates first practiced it, among good food, good company and a room full of people who came to think.