Abstract

Rhetoric and philosophy have long attended to the conditions, dynamics, and relative benefits of debate. Antiquity's deep concern for the relationship between debate and city-serving pedagogy remains an open question. In part through a shared commitment to argumentation theory, rhetoric and philosophy have agreed on and sparred over debate's constitutive and performative role in truth seeking, critical understanding, and collective action. With different and shared idioms, they have touted debate as a fundament of public life, investigated how debate may productively trouble norms of publicity, and reflected on whether the "problem" with the public lies with its reductive affection for debate as antagonism or its...