Logic & Debate
The arts of argument.
The trivium trains a student to think clearly, question well, and speak persuasively. This section gathers the tools of logic, dialectic, and rhetoric, the main formats of school debate, and a bank of resolutions drawn from the works in the library.
Part one
Logic: the grammar of reasoning
Logic studies the forms of correct reasoning, apart from what any particular argument is about. Its classical source is Aristotle. His logical treatises were gathered by later editors into a collection called the Organon, the “instrument,” because logic was understood as the tool that every other discipline uses.
The Organon
- Categories: the kinds of things a term can signify: substance, quantity, quality, relation, place, time, position, state, action, and passion.
- On Interpretation: the proposition, affirmation and denial, and how statements are opposed to one another.
- Prior Analytics: the syllogism and the conditions of valid inference.
- Posterior Analytics: demonstration, the kind of reasoning that yields scientific knowledge from first principles.
- Topics: dialectical reasoning from widely accepted opinions, and the “places” (topoi) where arguments are found.
- Sophistical Refutations: arguments that only seem to refute, the first catalogue of fallacies.
The library does not hold the Organon itself, but it holds Aristotle at work in The Nicomachean Ethics, Politics, and De Anima. In the Latin West, much of this logic was first known through Boethius’s translations and commentaries; his The Consolation of Philosophy shows the same mind turned to dialogue.
The three acts of the mind
Scholastic teachers arranged logic around three acts of the mind, each with its own product and its own kind of error.
- Simple apprehension grasps what a thing is and produces a term. Its fault is unclearness: a term used ambiguously or defined badly.
- Judgment affirms or denies something of something and produces a proposition. A proposition is true or false.
- Reasoning moves from propositions already known to a new one and produces an argument. An argument is valid or invalid.
Terms and definitions
A term may be univocal (used in one sense, as “triangle”), equivocal (used in unrelated senses, as “bark” of a dog and of a tree), or analogical (used in related senses, as “healthy” said of a body, a diet, and a complexion). Many disputes end the moment the parties notice they are using one word in two senses.
The classical definition gives the genus (the wider class) and the specific difference (what sets this kind apart within it): man is a rational animal. Porphyry’s five predicables name the ways a term can be said of a subject: genus, species, difference, property, and accident. Before debating any resolution, define its key terms this way and ask whether your opponent would accept the definition.
Propositions: A, E, I, O
A categorical proposition joins a subject and a predicate. It has a quantity (universal or particular) and a quality (affirmative or negative). Medieval logicians named the four forms with the vowels of AffIrmo and nEgO. Using the tyrant of Plato’s The Republic Book IX as the subject:
- A (universal affirmative): Every tyrant is wretched.
- E (universal negative): No tyrant is wretched.
- I (particular affirmative): Some tyrant is wretched.
- O (particular negative): Some tyrant is not wretched.
A term is distributed when the proposition speaks of every member of its class. Universals distribute their subjects; negatives distribute their predicates. So the A form distributes only its subject, the E form both terms, the I form neither, and the O form only its predicate.
The square of opposition
Every S is P
No S is P
(A–O, E–I)
Some S is P
Some S is not P
- Contradictories (A and O; E and I) cannot both be true and cannot both be false. To refute a universal claim, you need only its contradictory: one counterexample.
- Contraries (A and E) cannot both be true but can both be false. A debater who answers “every” with “none” has taken on more than refutation requires.
- Subcontraries (I and O) cannot both be false but can both be true.
- Subalternation: if A is true, I is true; if E is true, O is true. The traditional square assumes the subject class has members.
The categorical syllogism
A categorical syllogism has two premises and a conclusion, and exactly three terms. The major term is the predicate of the conclusion; the minor term is its subject; the middle term appears in both premises and links them, but not in the conclusion.
Every man is mortal. (major premise)
Socrates is a man. (minor premise)
Therefore Socrates is mortal. (conclusion)
The rules of validity follow from distribution:
- There must be exactly three terms, each used in the same sense throughout. (A shift in meaning creates a hidden fourth term.)
- The middle term must be distributed at least once.
- No term may be distributed in the conclusion that was not distributed in a premise (the fallacies of illicit major and illicit minor).
- From two negative premises nothing follows.
- If a premise is negative, the conclusion must be negative; if both premises are affirmative, the conclusion must be affirmative.
- From two particular premises nothing follows.
An argument is valid when the conclusion follows from the premises, and sound when it is valid and its premises are true. Keep the two questions apart. A good refutation says which one it is attacking.
Conditional reasoning: validity is not the whole question
Hypothetical syllogisms reason from “if … then” premises. Two forms are valid: modus ponens (if P then Q; P; therefore Q) and modus tollens (if P then Q; not Q; therefore not P). Two look similar and are invalid: affirming the consequent (if P then Q; Q; therefore P) and denying the antecedent (if P then Q; not P; therefore not Q).
Aquinas gives a clean example of modus tollens in the first objection he raises against the existence of God:
“If, therefore, God existed, there would be no evil discoverable; but there is evil in the world. Therefore God does not exist”
The form is valid. Aquinas does not quarrel with it; he answers by denying the conditional premise, arguing that God permits evil only because He can bring good out of it:
“Since God is the highest good, He would not allow any evil to exist in His works, unless His omnipotence and goodness were such as to bring good even out of evil”
This is a model of mature refutation: grant what is valid, and locate precisely the premise that is false.
Induction and its pitfalls
Deduction moves from general to particular; induction gathers particulars toward a general claim. Francis Bacon titled his treatise Novum Organum, a “new organon,” to set a disciplined method of induction beside Aristotle’s. He warned that the mind tends to see what it wants to see:
“The human understanding resembles not a dry light, but admits a tincture of the will”
His example of the votive tablets hung in a temple by sailors who survived shipwreck after making vows makes the point about evidence that is never counted:
“But where are the portraits of those who have perished in spite of their vows”
Informal fallacies, with examples from the library
Informal fallacies are errors of content and context rather than of form. Aristotle’s Sophistical Refutations began the catalogue; these are the ones debaters meet most often.
- Ad hominem (against the person)
- Attacking the speaker instead of the argument. In Twelve Angry Men, Juror Ten’s contempt for the defendant’s background stands in for an account of the evidence; the other jurors answer by returning to the facts.
- Appeal to the many (ad populum)
- Treating popularity as proof. In the Crito (The Last Days of Socrates), Crito urges escape partly because of what people will think; Socrates replies that the opinion that matters is that of the one who understands justice, not that of the many.
- Appeal to pity (ad misericordiam)
- Substituting sympathy for reasons. In the Apology, Socrates declines the custom of bringing his children before the jury to plead for him, and asks to be judged on the argument alone.
- Straw man
- Refuting a distorted version of an opponent’s view. In the Apology, Socrates complains that his old accusers, and the comic stage of Aristophanes’ Clouds, present a caricature of him as a speculator about the heavens who makes the weaker argument the stronger.
- Begging the question (circular reasoning)
- Assuming the conclusion in a premise. Near the end of the Euthyphro, Socrates points out that Euthyphro’s definitions of piety have walked in a circle and come back to the one they had already rejected.
- Equivocation
- Shifting the sense of a key term mid-argument. The witches’ prophecies in Macbeth (that no man of woman born will harm him, that he is safe until Birnam Wood comes to Dunsinane) are true in a sense Macbeth does not hear. The Porter’s joke about an equivocator knocking at hell gate names the theme.
- Hasty generalization and the uncounted case
- Drawing a general rule from too few or too selected instances. Bacon’s votive tablets, above, are the classic example.
- False cause (post hoc ergo propter hoc)
- Assuming that what came after was caused by what came before. The history of medicine is full of remedies credited with recoveries that would have come anyway; physicians from the Hippocratic writers to Galen debated how a cause is known: by reasoning, by experience, or by both.
- Appeal to force (ad baculum)
- Replacing argument with threat. In Thucydides’ Melian Dialogue (The History of the Peloponnesian War), the Athenians set aside questions of justice and argue from power alone.
- Appeal to the trappings of authority
- Accepting a claim because of the speaker’s robes rather than reasons. Pascal observes:
“If magistrates had true justice, and if physicians had the true art of healing, they would have no occasion for square caps”
Other fallacies to know by name: false dilemma (presenting two options when more exist), composition and division (reasoning from parts to whole or whole to parts without warrant), tu quoque (“you do it too”), slippery slope (asserting an unsupported chain of consequences), and red herring (changing the subject).
Part two
Dialectic: reasoning together by question and answer
Where logic studies the form of arguments, dialectic is the art of testing positions in conversation. It assumes two people who want the truth more than the victory.
The Socratic method
In Plato’s dialogues, Socrates asks a companion to define something he claims to know (piety, courage, justice), then draws out consequences of the definition until it collides with something else the companion believes. This testing is called the elenchus. It often ends in aporia, an honest puzzlement that clears the ground for real inquiry.
- Euthyphro (The Last Days of Socrates): the famous question whether the pious is loved by the gods because it is pious, or pious because it is loved.
- The Republic, Book I (The Republic): three definitions of justice tested in turn, ending with Thrasymachus’s claim that justice is the advantage of the stronger.
- The Symposium (The Symposium): Socrates questions Agathon, then recounts how Diotima once questioned him.
- The Phaedrus (Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII): rhetoric worthy of the name requires knowing the truth of the subject and the nature of the soul being addressed. Socrates tells of an Egyptian king who warned that writing could become a substitute for understanding:
“this discovery of yours will create forgetfulness in the learners' souls, because they will not use their memories”
The motive behind it all is stated at the trial:
“the unexamined life is not worth living”
Practicing it: ask for definitions; test them with counterexamples; ask what follows if the claim is true; restate the other person’s answer before you build on it; and be willing to say “I was wrong about that.”
Later writers kept the dialogue form alive. In Hume’s Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, three speakers each state their case at full strength, which is good practice for learning to give an opponent’s position its best form before answering it. Mill makes the same point in On Liberty:
“if it is not fully, frequently, and fearlessly discussed, it will be held as a dead dogma, not a living truth”
The disputatio
The medieval universities turned dialectic into a formal exercise, the disputed question. Thomas Aquinas wrote each article of the Summa Theologica in its form:
- The question, posed as “Whether …” (utrum).
- Objections (videtur quod, “it seems that”): the strongest arguments for the answer Aquinas will reject, stated fairly and often at full strength.
- Sed contra (“on the contrary”): a brief appeal to an authority on the other side, usually Scripture or a Father of the Church.
- Respondeo (“I answer that”): the body of the article, where the question is actually resolved, often by drawing distinctions.
- Replies to the objections: each objection answered in turn, conceding what is true in it.
Example: Summa Theologica I, Q. 2, Art. 3, “Whether God exists?”
Objection 1 argues from the existence of evil (quoted above). Objection 2 argues that nature and human will can account for everything, so God need not be supposed. Sed contra: God names Himself in Exodus 3:14. Respondeo:
“I answer that, The existence of God can be proved in five ways”
Aquinas then gives the arguments from motion, efficient causation, possibility and necessity, gradation, and the governance of things. The fifth concludes:
“Therefore some intelligent being exists by whom all natural things are directed to their end; and this being we call God”
Reply to Objection 1: God permits evil because He can bring good from it (quoted above). Reply to Objection 2: what nature and human will do must still be traced to a first cause.
The form teaches habits every debater needs: state the other side before your own, state it well, answer the question actually asked, and answer every objection. Aquinas explains in the first question of the Summa why reason has a place in sacred teaching at all:
“Since therefore grace does not destroy nature but perfects it, natural reason should minister to faith as the natural bent of the will ministers to charity”
Exercise: take a resolution from the bank below, phrase it as “Whether …,” and write three objections, a sed contra, a respondeo, and three replies.
Part three
Rhetoric: speaking the truth persuasively
Aristotle: three modes of proof
Aristotle’s Rhetoric (not in the library) opens by calling rhetoric the counterpart of dialectic, and defines it as the power of seeing, in each case, the available means of persuasion. Those means are of three kinds:
- Ethos: persuasion through the character of the speaker, shown in the speech as good sense, virtue, and goodwill toward the audience.
- Pathos: persuasion through putting the audience in the right frame of mind, so that their emotions fit the facts.
- Logos: persuasion through the argument itself, by the enthymeme (a rhetorical syllogism with a premise left for the audience to supply) and the example.
He also distinguishes three kinds of oratory. Deliberative speech, as in an assembly, concerns the future and asks what is advantageous or harmful. Forensic or judicial speech, as in a court, concerns the past and asks what is just or unjust. Epideictic or ceremonial speech concerns the present and assigns praise or blame. Thucydides gives all three: the Funeral Oration (epideictic), the Mytilene Debate between Cleon and Diodotus (deliberative), and the Plataeans’ plea before their Spartan judges (forensic), all in The History of the Peloponnesian War.
The Federalist opens with a deliberative appeal that rests on all three proofs, framing ratification as a test of whether a people can choose its government by reason:
“whether societies of men are really capable or not of establishing good government from reflection and choice”
Federalist No. 51 builds its case for checks and balances on a premise about human nature, put in a memorable antithesis:
“If men were angels, no government would be necessary. If angels were to govern men, neither external nor internal controls on government would be necessary”
Cicero: the five canons
Roman teaching, preserved in Cicero’s De Inventione and the Rhetorica ad Herennium once attributed to him, divided the orator’s work into five canons:
- Invention (inventio): finding what can be said, using the topics and the questions at issue.
- Arrangement (dispositio): ordering it, classically as introduction (exordium), statement of facts (narratio), division (partitio), proof (confirmatio), refutation (refutatio), and conclusion (peroratio).
- Style (elocutio): choosing words and figures suited to subject and audience, in the plain, middle, or grand style.
- Memory (memoria): holding the speech and its materials in mind.
- Delivery (pronuntiatio or actio): voice and gesture.
Cicero also named the orator’s three duties: to teach, to delight, and to move. Augustine, who taught rhetoric before his conversion (Confessions), took over these duties for Christian preachers in Book IV of On Christian Doctrine. Plutarch’s Life of Cicero, in The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, tells the story of the orator’s career; his Life of Demosthenes, in The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, tells how the young Demosthenes overcame a weak voice and poor delivery by disciplined practice.
Quintilian: the good man speaking well
Quintilian’s Institutio Oratoria (about 95 AD), a twelve-book course in the education of an orator from the cradle, adopts Cato the Elder’s definition of the orator as vir bonus dicendi peritus, a good man skilled in speaking. For Quintilian, eloquence cut off from virtue is not true oratory. Classical Christian schools take up the same ideal: the aim of rhetoric is not cleverness but wisdom and virtue expressed with clarity and grace.
The progymnasmata
The progymnasmata (“preliminary exercises”) were the graded composition course of ancient and Renaissance schools. The best known sequence, from Aphthonius of Antioch (fourth century AD), has fourteen exercises, each building on the last. Suggested library material for each:
| Exercise | What the student does | Practice with |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Fable | Retell a short moral tale | Aesop, whose fables Socrates set to verse in prison (Phaedo, in The Last Days of Socrates) |
| 2. Narrative | Retell an event clearly, briefly, plausibly | The Histories or Metamorphoses |
| 3. Chreia | Expand a memorable saying or deed of a known person | Socrates’ sayings in The Last Days of Socrates |
| 4. Maxim | Expand a general proverb | Essays or Pensees |
| 5. Refutation | Argue that a story is implausible | A myth in Metamorphoses |
| 6. Confirmation | Argue that a story is plausible | The same story, from the other side |
| 7. Commonplace | Amplify against an acknowledged vice | The tyrant in The Republic Book IX |
| 8. Encomium | Praise a person or thing | The speeches on Love in The Symposium |
| 9. Invective | Blame a person or thing | A villain from Macbeth |
| 10. Comparison | Weigh two persons or things | Plutarch’s paired Lives in The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives |
| 11. Characterization | Write the words a character would speak | What Socrates might have said to Crito the next morning |
| 12. Description | Bring a scene vividly before the eyes | The shield of Achilles in The Iliad Book XVIII |
| 13. Thesis | Argue a general question | Whether one should marry, in Bacon’s “Of Marriage and Single Life” (Essays) |
| 14. Law | Argue for or against a proposed law | The sale of poisons in On Liberty, Chapter V |
The last two exercises lead straight into formal debate: the thesis is the ancestor of the value resolution, and the law is the ancestor of the policy resolution.
Part four
Debate formats
Speech times below are typical; leagues and tournaments set their own rules, so check the current rules for your league before you compete.
Socratic seminar
A discussion of a shared text, usually in a circle, guided by a leader who asks open questions and does not lecture.
- Prepare: read the text twice, mark passages, and bring two questions of your own. Each work’s student guide includes seminar questions that move from comprehension to interpretation to the large questions.
- Structure: an opening question; discussion that returns again and again to the text; a closing question that connects the text to the participants’ lives.
- Norms: cite the page or line; address one another, not only the leader; build on or challenge the previous speaker by name; invite quieter members in.
Lincoln-Douglas (value debate)
One-on-one debate on a resolution of value, named for the seven 1858 debates between Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas in the Illinois Senate race.
- Case structure: a value (the ultimate good at stake, such as justice), a criterion (the standard by which to judge whether the value is upheld), definitions, and two or three contentions that show why your side best meets the criterion.
- Typical order: affirmative constructive (6 min); cross-examination by negative (3); negative constructive (7); cross-examination by affirmative (3); first affirmative rebuttal (4); negative rebuttal (6); second affirmative rebuttal (3); plus prep time for each side.
- Library preparation: Antigone’s appeal to unwritten law against Creon’s decree in The Theban Plays is a model clash of values:
“The immutable unwritten laws of Heaven. They were not born today nor yesterday; They die not; and none knoweth whence they sprang”
Team policy
Two-person teams debate whether a government or other agent should adopt a specific plan.
- Affirmative presents a plan and must carry the stock issues: significance and harms (a real problem), inherency (the present system will not fix it), solvency (the plan will), and topicality (the plan falls within the resolution).
- Negative may attack any stock issue, argue disadvantages (harms the plan would cause), or offer a competing counterplan.
- Typical order: four constructives (about 8 minutes each), each followed by a 3-minute cross-examination, then four rebuttals (about 5 minutes each), with the negative giving the first rebuttal and the affirmative the last.
- Library preparation: The Federalist Papers and The Anti-Federalist Papers are an extended policy debate, plan and counterplan, harms and solvency.
Parliamentary
Limited-preparation debate modeled loosely on a legislature. The motion is announced shortly before the round, so debaters rely on general knowledge, reasoning, and wit rather than prepared evidence.
- Sides: Government (Prime Minister and Member of Government) proposes; Opposition (Leader and Member of the Opposition) opposes.
- Points of information replace cross-examination: brief questions offered during an opponent’s speech, which the speaker may accept or decline.
- Preparation: broad reading in history, government, and ethics, much of it in this library, matters more than files.
Formal disputatio
A classroom revival of the medieval exercise. A respondent defends a thesis; opponents each present an objection in syllogistic form; a presider keeps order and gives the final determination.
- The opponent states a syllogism. The respondent repeats it exactly, then answers each premise: concedo (I grant it), nego (I deny it), or distinguo (I distinguish: true in one sense, false in another).
- The opponent presses on whatever was denied or distinguished with a new syllogism, and so on until the objection is resolved or the presider closes it.
- Good preparation is the article form above: anticipate the objections and prepare your distinctions in advance.
Mock trial
Teams play attorneys and witnesses in a simulated case.
- Order: opening statements; the prosecution or plaintiff’s case (direct examination of its witnesses, cross-examination by the defense, redirect); the defense case in the same pattern; closing arguments.
- Skills: open questions on direct (“What happened next?”), short leading questions on cross (“You were across the street?”), and timely objections (relevance, hearsay, leading, speculation).
- Library preparation: Socrates’ defense in the Apology (The Last Days of Socrates); the founding of the jury court in The Oresteia; the record of The Trial of Joan of Arc; the drumhead court in Billy Budd; and the deliberation in Twelve Angry Men.
Part five
Preparing and competing
Preparation
- Define the resolution: genus and difference for each key term, and the sources for your definitions.
- Find the question at issue: is the dispute about fact, definition, quality, or procedure? (See stasis, below.)
- Read both sides: write the best case against your own before you finalize yours.
- Gather evidence honestly: quote accurately, cite fully, and never stretch a source beyond what it says.
- Write briefs: short prepared answers to the arguments you expect, each with a claim, a reason, and support.
Structure
- Signpost: tell the judge where you are (“My second contention …”, “On their first point …”).
- Claim, warrant, impact: what you assert, why it is true, and why it matters to the decision.
- Preview and review: in Cicero’s terms, a clear partitio at the start and a peroratio that gathers the reasons at the end.
Cross-examination
- Ask short, closed questions with a purpose; each should secure an admission or expose a gap you will use in a later speech.
- Do not argue during cross-examination; save the conclusion for your speech.
- When answering, be direct and honest; concede what is true and distinguish what is not, as in the disputatio.
Flowing
- Take notes on a “flow”: one column per speech, with each argument written across from the response to it.
- Use consistent abbreviations, and two colors for the two sides.
- Before each rebuttal, scan the flow for arguments your opponent dropped or answered weakly.
Refutation
A simple four-step pattern: they say (restate the argument fairly), but (your answer), because (your reason or evidence), therefore (why your answer matters to the round). Then weigh: explain which arguments matter most and why, so the judge does not have to.
Part six
Classical and modern practice compared
Modern school debate grew out of the classical tradition, and many of its techniques have older names.
| Modern practice | Classical counterpart |
|---|---|
| Stock issues; topicality; framework debates | Stasis theory (Hermagoras, then Cicero’s De Inventione): is the dispute about fact (did it happen?), definition (what is it?), quality (was it right?), or procedure (is this the proper forum?) |
| Claim, warrant, impact | The enthymeme: a conclusion supported by a reason, with a premise the audience supplies |
| Cross-examination | The Socratic elenchus and the opponent’s syllogism in the disputatio |
| Line-by-line refutation | Aquinas’s replies to objections, answering every argument in turn |
| Writing the opponent’s best case | The videtur quod: objections stated at full strength before the answer |
| Impact calculus (magnitude, probability, time) | Deliberative topics of the advantageous and the honorable |
| Evidence cards and citations | Testimony and authorities, weighed by the credibility (ethos) of their source |
| Flowing | Memoria, and the commonplace book of collected arguments |
| Speaker points for clarity and persuasiveness | Elocutio and actio: style and delivery fitted to the audience |
The classical tradition adds two things modern technique can lose sight of. First, the audience: rhetoric is addressed to real hearers, so a speech should be clear, measured, and understandable to an attentive citizen judge. Second, the speaker: in Quintilian’s ideal, skill in argument is the servant of truth and virtue, and an honest concession is often the most persuasive thing a debater can say.
Part seven
Resolutions bank
Each work’s student guide proposes a debate resolution. Most are resolutions of value suited to Lincoln-Douglas or a formal disputatio; those that name an agent and a course of action can be run as policy. Read the work, then open its student guide for the central argument and a rhetorical device to study. 286 resolutions, arranged by era.
Ancient (58)
Resolved: God's speeches from the whirlwind are a sufficient answer to Job's complaint.
The Bible, Anonymous (composed c. 1000 BCE – c. 100 CE; KJV 1611)Resolved: Achilles is justified in withdrawing from battle after Agamemnon takes Briseis.
The Iliad, Homer (c. 8th century BCE)Resolved: Odysseus is responsible for the deaths of his crew.
The Odyssey, Homer (c. 8th century BCE)Resolved: Heraclitus is right that strife, not rest, is the source of order and excellence.
Fragments, Heraclitus (c. 500 BCE)Resolved: Deceiving an enemy in war is always morally permissible.
The Art of War, Sun Tzu (c. 5th century BCE)Resolved: Athena was right to acquit Orestes.
The Oresteia, Aeschylus (458 BCE)Resolved: Jason is more to blame than Medea for the deaths of their children.
Medea and Other Plays, Euripides (431 BCE (Medea))Resolved: In relations between nations, the Athenians at Melos were right that justice applies only between equals in power.
The History of the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides (c. 431–411 BCE)Resolved: Herodotus is right that no one should be called happy until the end of his life.
The Histories, Herodotus (c. 430 BCE)Resolved: Antigone is right and Creon is wrong, without qualification.
The Theban Plays, Sophocles (c. 429–401 BCE)Resolved: Aristophanes' portrait of Socrates in The Clouds was a fair criticism of the new learning, even if unfair to Socrates himself.
Lysistrata and Other Plays, Aristophanes (411 BCE (Lysistrata))Resolved: Pentheus is more to blame for his destruction than Dionysus.
The Bacchae and Other Plays, Euripides (405 BCE (The Bacchae))Resolved: A physician's first duty is to foretell the course of an illness honestly, even when he cannot cure it.
Hippocratic Writings, Hippocrates (c. 5th–4th century BCE)Resolved: Socrates was right to refuse Crito's offer of escape.
The Last Days of Socrates, Plato (c. 399–347 BCE)Resolved: Aristophanes' myth of the lost other half describes human love more truly than Diotima's ladder.
The Symposium, Plato (c. 385 BCE)Resolved: A person who could do wrong without ever being caught would still have good reason to be just.
The Republic, Plato (c. 380 BCE)Resolved: Thamus was right that writing weakens wisdom more than it preserves it.
Phaedrus and Letters VII and VIII, Plato (c. 370 BCE)Resolved: Xenophon was justified in striking soldiers to keep the army moving during the winter march.
The Persian Expedition, Xenophon (c. 370 BCE)Resolved: Timaeus's craftsman, who orders pre-existing chaos according to an eternal model, is closer to the Creator of Genesis than to the chance-driven atoms of Lucretius.
Timaeus, Plato (c. 360 BCE)Resolved: Aristotle's account of the soul as the form of the body is compatible with the Christian hope of resurrection.
De Anima, Aristotle (c. 350 BCE)Resolved: A large middle class is the surest foundation of a stable political community.
Politics, Aristotle (c. 350 BCE)Resolved: Virtue is acquired by habit, not by knowledge.
The Nicomachean Ethics, Aristotle (c. 340 BCE)Resolved: Describing a person by outward behavior alone, as Theophrastus does, gives a truer picture of character than describing his thoughts and motives.
Characters, Theophrastus (c. 319 BCE)Resolved: Krishna successfully answers Arjuna's moral objection to fighting his kinsmen.
The Bhagavad Gita, Anonymous (attributed to Vyasa) (c. 2nd century BCE)Resolved: A government may rightly use secret surveillance of its own citizens to protect the public order.
The Arthashastra, Kautilya (c. 2nd century BCE – 3rd century CE)Resolved: Lucretius succeeds in showing that death is nothing to be feared.
On the Nature of the Universe, Lucretius (c. 55 BCE)Resolved: Caesar was justified in refusing to let the Mandubii pass through his lines at Alesia.
The Conquest of Gaul, Julius Caesar (58-50 BCE)Resolved: Caesar's clemency at Corfinium was political calculation rather than mercy.
The Civil War, Julius Caesar (49-48 BCE)Resolved: Horace's gentle mockery corrects vice more effectively than Persius's severe rebuke.
The Satires of Horace and Persius, Horace and Persius (c. 35–30 BCE / c. 60 CE)Resolved: Aeneas was right to kill Turnus.
The Aeneid, Virgil (c. 29–19 BCE)Resolved: In the Metamorphoses, transformation is more often a mercy than a punishment.
Metamorphoses, Ovid (8 CE)Resolved: A physician should attempt a doubtful remedy rather than attempt none.
On Medicine, Aulus Cornelius Celsus (c. 30 CE)Resolved: Observation and experience, rather than theory of the body, should be the foundation of medicine.
De Materia Medica, Dioscorides (c. 50–70 CE)Resolved: Fear of an evil is usually worse than the evil itself.
Letters from a Stoic, Seneca (c. 63–65 CE)Resolved: Josephus was justified in surrendering to Rome and urging his people to do the same.
The Jewish War, Flavius Josephus (c. 75 CE)Resolved: Pliny's Natural History did more to advance knowledge than to spread error.
Natural History: A Selection, Pliny the Elder (c. 77 CE)Resolved: The Testimonium Flavianum, with its suspected Christian phrases removed, is reliable evidence that Josephus wrote about Jesus.
Jewish Antiquities, Flavius Josephus (c. 93-94 CE)Resolved: Agricola's quiet service under Domitian was more admirable than open defiance would have been.
The Agricola and the Germania, Tacitus (98 CE)Resolved: Ignatius was right to beg the Roman Christians not to try to save his life.
Early Christian Writings: The Apostolic Fathers, Various (c. 1st–2nd century CE)Resolved: A true friend should correct our faults even at the risk of the friendship.
Essays, Plutarch (c. 100 CE (Moralia))Resolved: Phocion served Athens better than Demosthenes.
The Age of Alexander: Nine Greek Lives, Plutarch (c. 100 CE)Resolved: Caesar was more responsible for the fall of the Republic than any of the other five men in these Lives.
The Fall of the Roman Republic: Six Lives, Plutarch (c. 100 CE)Resolved: Seneca was wrong to serve as Nero's adviser.
The Annals of Imperial Rome, Tacitus (c. 109–117 CE)Resolved: Suetonius' anecdotes about the private lives of the emperors are trustworthy evidence for judging how they ruled.
The Twelve Caesars, Suetonius (c. 121 CE)Resolved: Marcus Aurelius's Stoicism asks a person to control more than is truly in human power.
Meditations, Marcus Aurelius (c. 170–180 CE)Resolved: The conversion of Lucius in Book 11 of The Golden Ass is meant to be taken seriously rather than as satire.
The Golden Ass, Apuleius (c. 170 CE)Resolved: A physician must be trained in philosophy, not only in medicine, in order to practice medicine well.
Galen: Selected Works, Galen (c. 160–210 CE)Resolved: Plotinus's ascent to the One leaves the body and the visible world behind rather than redeeming them.
Enneads, Plotinus (c. 253-270)Resolved: The Council of Nicaea was right to use a non-scriptural word to defend scriptural teaching.
The Early Christian Creeds, Various (2nd-5th centuries CE)Resolved: Eusebius was right to read the conversion of Constantine as a providential deliverance of the church.
The History of the Church, Eusebius (c. 325 CE)Resolved: Withdrawal from society can be the most useful service a person gives to it.
Early Christian Lives, Athanasius, Jerome and others (c. 356–420 CE)Resolved: Gregory is right that the human being is more than a little world made of the same elements as the universe.
On the Making of Man, Gregory of Nyssa (c. 379)Resolved: Chrysostom was right to use Antioch's fear of the emperor to press for the reform of everyday habits such as swearing.
Homilies on the Statues, John Chrysostom (387 CE)Resolved: Augustine's account of the pear theft in Book II shows that human beings can choose evil for its own sake.
Confessions, Augustine of Hippo (c. 397–400 CE)Resolved: Sulpitius's account of miracles strengthens rather than weakens his portrait of Martin's holiness.
Life of St. Martin, Sulpitius Severus; Alexander Roberts (c. 397; Roberts translation 1894)Resolved: Augustine's figurative readings of John's signs illuminate the Gospel more than they obscure its plain narrative.
Homilies on the Gospel of John, Augustine of Hippo (c. 406-420 CE)Resolved: Augustine is right that a kingdom without justice is no better than a great band of robbers.
City of God, Augustine of Hippo (413–426 CE)Resolved: Patrick's own writings are a better guide to his holiness than the later legends of Muirchu and Tirechan.
St. Patrick's Writings, Patrick of Ireland; Muirchu; Tirechan (5th century; later legends 7th century)
Medieval (23)
Resolved: Boethius's distinction between time and eternity preserves human freedom against divine foreknowledge.
The Consolation of Philosophy, Boethius (c. 524 CE)Resolved: A life ordered by a fixed daily rule makes a person more free, not less.
The Rule of St Benedict, Benedict of Nursia (c. 530 CE)Resolved: A reader new to the Quran should read the suras in order of revelation rather than in their canonical order.
The Koran, Anonymous (Islamic scripture) (c. 610–632 CE)Resolved: Notker's legendary anecdotes tell us more about Charlemagne's true character than Einhard's orderly biography.
Two Lives of Charlemagne, Einhard and Notker the Stammerer (c. 830 / c. 885)Resolved: Beowulf was right to fight the dragon himself rather than leave the battle to younger warriors.
Beowulf, Anonymous (c. 8th-11th century)Resolved: Roland was right to refuse to sound the olifant when Oliver first asked.
The Song of Roland, Anonymous (c. 1100)Resolved: Bernard's spiritual reading of the Song of Songs is truer to its place in Scripture than a reading of it as human love poetry alone.
Sermons on the Song of Songs, Bernard of Clairvaux (1135-1153)Resolved: Becket was right to resist the Constitutions of Clarendon even at the cost of his life.
St. Thomas Becket and the Canterbury Miracles, Edward Grim; Benedict of Peterborough; William of Canterbury tradition (1170-1173; miracle collections late 12th century)Resolved: In 'Bisclavret', the wife's punishment is just.
The Lais of Marie de France, Marie de France (c. 1170s)Resolved: Hagen, more than Kriemhild, is responsible for the destruction of the Burgundians.
The Nibelungenlied, Anonymous (c. 1200)Resolved: The Francis of the Little Flowers is truer to the historical Francis than the Francis of Bonaventure's official life.
Early Franciscan Sources, Francis of Assisi; Thomas of Celano; Bonaventure; Brother Ugolino; others (c. 1209-1390)Resolved: The households of Geel offered better care for the mentally afflicted than the asylums of the nineteenth century.
St. Dymphna and the Geel Colony, Pierre of Cambrai; Geel tradition (c. 1247; Geel colony tradition from the Middle Ages)Resolved: Bonaventure is right that study without devotion cannot reach the truth about God.
The Journey of the Mind into God, Bonaventure (1259)Resolved: A Christian physician should be willing to treat patients who cannot pay, even at real cost to his own livelihood.
Sts. Cosmas and Damian: Physician Saints, Jacobus de Voragine; Byzantine miracle tradition (late antique cult; medieval miracle collections)Resolved: Saints' legends that cannot be confirmed by history still deserve a place in the education of Christian students.
The Golden Legend: Popular Saints, Jacobus de Voragine; William Caxton (c. 1260 (Caxton translation 1483; Ellis edition 1900))Resolved: Rule by one, rightly tempered, is the best form of government, as Aquinas argues in De Regno.
De Regno, Thomas Aquinas (c. 1265-1266)Resolved: Aquinas's five ways succeed in proving the existence of God.
Summa Theologica, Thomas Aquinas (1265-1274)Resolved: Dante is right that spiritual and temporal authority should be held by separate hands.
The Divine Comedy, Dante Alighieri (c. 1308-1321)Resolved: The authorities of Strasbourg acted wisely in sending the dancers to the chapels of St. Vitus.
St. Vitus and the Dancing Mania, Vitus tradition; J. F. C. Hecker; Benjamin Guy Babington (medieval passion tradition; Hecker 1832, Babington translation 1833/1888)Resolved: Criseyde is more a victim of Fortune than a betrayer of Troilus.
Troilus and Criseyde, Geoffrey Chaucer (c. 1380s)Resolved: Gawain judges his own failure more truly than Bertilak and Arthur's court do.
Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, Anonymous (late 14th century)Resolved: Joan's refusal to submit her Voices to the judgment of the Rouen court was obedience to God, not disobedience to the Church.
The Trial of Joan of Arc, Jeanne d'Arc; Pierre Cauchon; Guillaume Bouille; T. Douglas Murray (1431; rehabilitation 1450-1456; Murray translation 1902)Resolved: Roch's decision to walk into plague-stricken towns was an act of virtue, not of reckless imprudence.
Sts. Roch and Sebastian: Plague Saints, Jacobus de Voragine; Francesco Diedo tradition; later plague devotion (c. 1260; Roch tradition c. 1478)
Renaissance Early Modern (27)
Resolved: It is better for a ruler to be feared than loved.
The Prince, Niccolo Machiavelli (1513 (published 1532))Resolved: Luther's doctrine of Christian freedom produces more good works than a doctrine of earned merit.
Selected Sermons and Reformation Treatises, Martin Luther (1517-1546)Resolved: A free nation should rely on citizen soldiers rather than a professional army.
The Art of War, Niccolo Machiavelli (1521)Resolved: A preacher should address the economic conduct of his hearers, such as rents and enclosure, from the pulpit.
Selected Sermons, Hugh Latimer (1548-1552)Resolved: Preaching through whole books of the Bible in order serves a congregation better than preaching on topics chosen by the pastor.
Selected Sermons, John Calvin (1549-1564)Resolved: Montaigne's scepticism serves Christian faith better than it threatens it.
Essays, Michel de Montaigne (1580-1595)Resolved: A person can have only one true friend in the sense Montaigne describes.
On Friendship, Michel de Montaigne (1580 (Essays))Resolved: Theseus is right that the lovers' story of the night in the wood is merely the fruit of imagination.
A Midsummer Night's Dream, William Shakespeare (c. 1595)Resolved: Bacon's counsel on dissimulation is compatible with Christian honesty.
Essays, Francis Bacon (1597-1625)Resolved: Malvolio's punishment in the dark room is a just correction of his pride.
Twelfth Night, William Shakespeare (c. 1601)Resolved: Don Quixote's return to sanity at the end of the book is a defeat rather than a victory.
Don Quixote, Miguel de Cervantes (1605–1615)Resolved: Cordelia was right to refuse her father's love test.
King Lear, William Shakespeare (c. 1606)Resolved: Lady Macbeth bears more guilt for Duncan's murder than Macbeth.
Macbeth, William Shakespeare (c. 1606)Resolved: Bacon's idols are a more serious obstacle to knowledge than lack of evidence.
Novum Organum, Francis Bacon (1620)Resolved: Burton is right that idleness is the chief cause of melancholy.
The Anatomy of Melancholy, Robert Burton (1621)Resolved: Illness is better understood as a spiritual event than as merely a bodily one.
Sermons and Devotions upon Emergent Occasions, John Donne (1624 / 1631)Resolved: Samuel Johnson was right that the metaphysical poets valued cleverness more than truth of feeling.
The Metaphysical Poets, Various (ed. Helen Gardner) (c. 1600–1680 (anthology 1957))Resolved: Descartes's method of doubting everything is a sound way to begin the search for truth.
Discourse on Method, Rene Descartes (1637)Resolved: Descartes's method of doubt does more to strengthen religious belief than to weaken it.
Meditations on First Philosophy, Rene Descartes (1641)Resolved: Descartes succeeds in explaining how the soul and the body act on each other.
The Passions of the Soul, Rene Descartes (1649)Resolved: Hobbes is right that a people without a sovereign power would fall into a war of every man against every man.
Leviathan, Thomas Hobbes (1651)Resolved: Philinte, not Alceste, is the wiser man in The Misanthrope.
The Misanthrope and Other Plays, Molière (1666 (The Misanthrope))Resolved: Pascal's wager gives a rational person sufficient reason to seek faith.
Pensees, Blaise Pascal (1670)Resolved: Understanding the causes of an emotion is enough to master it.
Ethics, Baruch Spinoza (1677)Resolved: Newton was right to refuse to frame hypotheses about the cause of gravity.
Principia, Isaac Newton (1687)Resolved: Locke is right that a person is the same person only as far as his consciousness reaches back.
An Essay Concerning Human Understanding, John Locke (1689)Resolved: Enjoying the protection and property of a government is genuine consent to its authority.
Second Treatise of Government, John Locke (1689)
Computing (11)
Resolved: Disagreements about what is true could in principle be settled by calculation.
Logical Writings on Binary Arithmetic and Universal Character, Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (1679-1703)Resolved: Lovelace was right that a machine can never originate anything.
Notes on Menabrea's Sketch of the Analytical Engine, Ada Lovelace (1843)Resolved: Every valid argument can in principle be checked by calculation.
An Investigation of the Laws of Thought, George Boole (1854)Resolved: The British government was right to withdraw its support from Babbage's Difference Engine.
Passages from the Life of a Philosopher, Charles Babbage (1864)Resolved: Godel's incompleteness theorems show that the human mind is not a machine following fixed rules.
On Formally Undecidable Propositions, Kurt Godel (1931)Resolved: A machine that reliably passes Turing's imitation game should be said to think.
On Computable Numbers and Computing Machinery, Alan Turing (1936 / 1950)Resolved: A model of the mind as a network of logical switches explains thinking rather than merely describing its outward form.
A Logical Calculus of the Ideas Immanent in Nervous Activity, Warren McCulloch and Walter Pitts (1943)Resolved: A machine that stores and links our records will strengthen human memory rather than weaken it.
As We May Think, Vannevar Bush (1945)Resolved: Describing computers in the language of organs, neurons, and memory has clarified more than it has confused our understanding of both machines and minds.
First Draft of a Report on the EDVAC, John von Neumann (1945)Resolved: Shannon's decision to set meaning aside was a gain for science and a loss for how people understand human communication.
A Mathematical Theory of Communication, Claude Shannon (1938 / 1948)Resolved: Describing the nervous system as a feedback machine illuminates human action more than it obscures it.
Cybernetics, Norbert Wiener (1948)
18th Century (25)
Resolved: The fable of the Troglodytes proves that a people cannot remain free without virtue.
Persian Letters, Montesquieu (1721)Resolved: The Houyhnhnms represent Swift's ideal for human life.
Gulliver's Travels, Jonathan Swift (1726)Resolved: Satire is a more effective means of moral persuasion than direct argument.
A Modest Proposal, Jonathan Swift (1729)Resolved: Franklin's method of tracking the thirteen virtues can make a person genuinely good, not merely well-behaved.
Autobiography and Poor Richard's Almanack, Benjamin Franklin (1732-1790)Resolved: Hume is right that moral distinctions are derived from feeling rather than from reason.
A Treatise of Human Nature, David Hume (1739-1740)Resolved: Whitefield's dramatic delivery served the gospel more than it distracted from it.
Selected Sermons, George Whitefield (1739-1770)Resolved: Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God is fundamentally a sermon of mercy rather than a sermon of wrath.
Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God and A Faithful Narrative, Jonathan Edwards (1737 / 1741)Resolved: Primitive Physick did its eighteenth-century readers more good than harm.
Sermons on Several Occasions and Primitive Physick, John Wesley (1746-1790)Resolved: An army held together by fear of its officers is weaker than one held together by loyalty to its cause.
Instructions for His Generals, Frederick the Great (1747 (Phillips translation 1944))Resolved: Hume's argument in Section X gives a reasonable person sufficient grounds to reject all testimony to miracles.
An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, David Hume (1748)Resolved: The final advice to cultivate our garden is a wise answer to the problem of evil, not an evasion of it.
Candide: Or Optimism, Voltaire (1759)Resolved: Sovereignty cannot be represented, and a people that only elects its lawmakers is not truly free.
The Social Contract, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1762)Resolved: Paine is right against Burke that no generation has authority to bind its successors to a form of government.
Common Sense, Rights of Man, The Age of Reason, and The American Crisis, Thomas Paine (1776-1794)Resolved: The Bill of Rights was necessary to secure the liberties the Constitution was designed to protect.
The Founding Documents, Continental Congress and United States Constitutional Convention (1776-1791)Resolved: Adams is right that a republic needs a second legislative chamber to restrain the popular assembly.
Thoughts on Government and Selected Letters, John Adams (1776-1826)Resolved: Philo's concession in Part 12 is sincere, and Hume's Dialogues end closer to theism than to scepticism.
Dialogues Concerning Natural Religion, David Hume (1779)Resolved: Kant's limits on knowledge serve Christian faith better than the rational proofs of God he rejects.
Critique of Pure Reason, Immanuel Kant (1781 (revised 1787))Resolved: Rousseau's Confessions are more an act of self-defence than an act of confession.
Confessions, Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1782-1789)Resolved: A kind act done from duty against one's inclination has greater moral worth than the same act done gladly from love.
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, Immanuel Kant (1785)Resolved: Madison's argument against a tax for teachers of religion rests more on Christian theology than on Enlightenment political theory.
Memorial and Remonstrance and Notes of Debates in the Federal Convention, James Madison (1785-1840)Resolved: Jefferson's Life and Morals of Jesus preserves what is essential in the Gospels.
Notes on the State of Virginia, Selected Letters, and The Jefferson Bible, Thomas Jefferson (1785-1820)Resolved: The Anti-Federalists were right that a free republic cannot be sustained over a territory as large as the United States.
The Anti-Federalist Papers, Various (1787-1788)Resolved: A well-designed constitution can preserve liberty even among a people who lack civic virtue.
The Federalist Papers, Alexander Hamilton, James Madison, and John Jay (1787-1788)Resolved: Allen and Jones were right to answer Mathew Carey publicly rather than let their service speak for itself.
A Narrative of the Proceedings of the Black People During the Late Awful Calamity in Philadelphia, Richard Allen and Absalom Jones (1794)Resolved: Washington was wrong to warn against political parties, because organized parties are necessary for a free people to govern itself.
Farewell Address and Selected Letters, George Washington (1775-1799)
19th Century (79)
Resolved: The independent Black church did more to secure freedom by building institutions than by public protest.
Early Black Church Sermons and Addresses, Various (1787-1930)Resolved: Pinel's moral treatment owed more to the practical experience of hospital attendants than to medical theory.
A Treatise on Insanity, Philippe Pinel (1801 (Davis trans. 1806))Resolved: Napoleon's letters show that his talent for administration mattered more to Europe than his victories in battle.
Letters of Napoleon, Napoleon Bonaparte (1796-1821)Resolved: Elinor's self-command is a greater virtue than Marianne's sincerity.
Sense and Sensibility, Jane Austen (1811)Resolved: Rush's claim that madness is a bodily disease did more good than harm to the insane of his time.
Medical Inquiries and Observations upon the Diseases of the Mind, Benjamin Rush (1812)Resolved: Moral treatment at the Retreat succeeded chiefly because of the Quaker community that sustained it, and could not be reproduced by a large public asylum.
Description of the Retreat, Samuel Tuke (1813)Resolved: Charlotte Lucas made a wise choice in marrying Mr Collins.
Pride and Prejudice, Jane Austen (1813)Resolved: Fanny Price was right to refuse Henry Crawford even if he would have reformed after marrying her.
Mansfield Park, Jane Austen (1814)Resolved: Catherine Morland's Gothic suspicions of General Tilney were closer to the truth than Henry Tilney admits.
Northanger Abbey, Jane Austen (1817 (written c. 1798–1799))Resolved: Anne Elliot was right to be persuaded by Lady Russell to break her engagement.
Persuasion, Jane Austen (1817)Resolved: Victor Frankenstein bears greater guilt than the creature for the deaths of William, Clerval, and Elizabeth.
Frankenstein, Mary Shelley (1818 (revised 1831))Resolved: Schopenhauer is right that all satisfaction is only the removal of a want.
The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer (1818 (expanded 1844))Resolved: Aubrey was morally bound to break his oath once he knew Ruthven intended to marry his sister.
The Vampyre, John Polidori (1819)Resolved: A general should never hold a council of war before a decisive action.
Napoleon's Maxims of War, Napoleon Bonaparte (1827)Resolved: Clausewitz is right that no skilful method can defeat a determined enemy without great bloodshed.
On War, Carl von Clausewitz (1832)Resolved: The greatest danger to a democratic people is not tyranny imposed from above but the citizens' own preference for comfort over self-government.
Democracy in America, Alexis de Tocqueville (1835 / 1840)Resolved: A revival of religion is the result of the right use of means rather than a sovereign surprise of God.
Lectures on Revivals of Religion, Charles Finney (1835)Resolved: Esquirol's idea of monomania did more to clarify than to confuse questions of criminal responsibility.
Mental Maladies, Jean-Etienne Dominique Esquirol (1838 (Hunt trans. 1845))Resolved: The unexplained ending of Arthur Gordon Pym is a deliberate artistic choice rather than a failure to finish the book.
The Narrative of Arthur Gordon Pym of Nantucket, Edgar Allan Poe (1838)Resolved: The Voyage of the Beagle is more valuable as a work of travel literature than as a work of science.
The Voyage of the Beagle, Charles Darwin (1839 (revised 1845))Resolved: Scrooge changes because he is afraid of his own death, not because he has learned to love.
A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens (1843)Resolved: Abraham's willingness to sacrifice Isaac was an act of faith, not a violation of morality.
Fear and Trembling, Soren Kierkegaard (1843)Resolved: Edmond Dantès's revenge on his enemies was just.
The Count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas (1844–1846)Resolved: Griesinger was right that mental diseases are, at bottom, diseases of the brain.
Mental Pathology and Therapeutics, Wilhelm Griesinger (1845 (English trans. 1867))Resolved: The founding principles of the United States condemned slavery from the beginning, as Douglass argued in 1852.
Narrative of the Life and What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?, Frederick Douglass (1845 / 1852)Resolved: Catherine's choice to marry Edgar Linton, more than Heathcliff's revenge, is the true cause of the novel's suffering.
Wuthering Heights, Emily Brontë (1847)Resolved: Marx and Engels were right that modern commerce dissolves traditional loyalties to family, place, and faith.
The Communist Manifesto, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels (1848)Resolved: The dreamer is better off for having met Nastenka.
White Nights, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1848)Resolved: Agnes Wickfield, not David, is the true hero of David Copperfield.
David Copperfield, Charles Dickens (1849–1850)Resolved: A person can be in despair without feeling unhappy.
The Sickness Unto Death, Soren Kierkegaard (1849)Resolved: Roger Chillingworth commits a greater sin than Arthur Dimmesdale.
The Scarlet Letter, Nathaniel Hawthorne (1850)Resolved: Compassion, not reason, is the true foundation of morality.
Essays and Aphorisms, Arthur Schopenhauer (1851)Resolved: William Ford's personal kindness made him a better man but not a better master.
12 Years a Slave, Solomon Northup (1853)Resolved: Thurstan Benson was right to present Ruth as a widow.
Ruth, Elizabeth Gaskell (1853)Resolved: A sermon should comfort the hearer more than it challenges him.
Selected Sermons, Charles Spurgeon (1855-1892)Resolved: Whitman's claim to speak for all Americans enlarges his readers more than it overrides them.
The Complete Poems, Walt Whitman (1855–1892)Resolved: Mr. Harding was right to resign the wardenship of Hiram's Hospital.
The Warden, Anthony Trollope (1855)Resolved: The law may rightly forbid an adult from doing what harms only himself.
On Liberty, John Stuart Mill (1859)Resolved: Darwin's theory of natural selection is compatible with belief that nature is the work of a Creator.
On the Origin of Species, Charles Darwin (1859)Resolved: Mill's distinction between higher and lower pleasures abandons the principle that pleasure alone is good.
Utilitarianism, John Stuart Mill (1861)Resolved: Bazarov's death refutes his nihilism.
Fathers and Sons, Ivan Turgenev (1862)Resolved: Raskolnikov's confession springs from repentance rather than from exhaustion and fear.
Crime and Punishment, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1866)Resolved: Jo was right to refuse Laurie.
Little Women, Louisa May Alcott (1868–1869)Resolved: A person whose violent act arises from a disease of the brain should not be held morally responsible for it.
Body and Mind, Henry Maudsley (1870)Resolved: Moody's organized campaigns, with their music, publicity, and inquiry rooms, strengthened rather than weakened the integrity of his preaching.
Selected Sermons, Dwight L. Moody (1870-1899)Resolved: An evolutionary account of the origin of the moral sense can explain why conscience obliges us.
The Descent of Man, Charles Darwin (1871)Resolved: Teaching medicine by presenting living patients before an audience does more good than harm.
Lectures on the Diseases of the Nervous System, Jean-Martin Charcot (1872-1887 (English lectures 1877-1881))Resolved: Nietzsche is right that Socratic rationalism destroyed Greek tragedy.
The Birth of Tragedy, Friedrich Nietzsche (1872)Resolved: Darwin's study of expression shows that human emotions differ from animal emotions only in degree, not in kind.
The Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, Charles Darwin (1872)Resolved: Sherman's principle that the costs of war are chargeable to those who caused it justifies the destruction of civilian property.
Memoirs, William Tecumseh Sherman (1875)Resolved: Tom Sawyer was right to break his oath to Huck by testifying at Muff Potter's trial.
The Adventures of Tom Sawyer, Mark Twain (1876)Resolved: The narrator's final realization is genuine repentance rather than another form of self-pity.
The Meek One, Fyodor Dostoyevsky (1876)Resolved: Cruelty from ignorance is as blameworthy as cruelty from malice.
Black Beauty, Anna Sewell (1877)Resolved: Winterbourne bears more responsibility for Daisy's isolation than the expatriate society that cuts her.
Daisy Miller, Henry James (1878)Resolved: Nora is right to leave her husband and children at the end of A Doll's House.
A Doll's House and Other Plays, Henrik Ibsen (1879)Resolved: Ivan Karamazov is morally guilty of his father's murder.
The Brothers Karamazov, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1880)Resolved: Dr. Sloper did right by his daughter in opposing her marriage to Morris Townsend.
Washington Square, Henry James (1880)Resolved: Isabel Archer is right to return to Rome.
The Portrait of a Lady, Henry James (1881)Resolved: The passengers in Boule de Suif are more guilty than the Prussian officer.
Selected Short Stories, Guy de Maupassant (1880s)Resolved: Modern science depends on a faith in truth that its own methods cannot justify, as Nietzsche argues in §344.
The Gay Science, Friedrich Nietzsche (1882 (expanded 1887))Resolved: The last man is a greater danger to human greatness than the believer whom Zarathustra opposes.
Thus Spoke Zarathustra, Friedrich Nietzsche (1883-1885)Resolved: Jim Hawkins was right to keep his word to Long John Silver.
Treasure Island, Robert Louis Stevenson (1883)Resolved: Grant's generous terms at Appomattox were the wisest decision of his military career.
Personal Memoirs, Ulysses S. Grant (1885-1886)Resolved: Pity is a strength of the soul and not, as Nietzsche claims, a weakness.
Beyond Good and Evil, Friedrich Nietzsche (1886)Resolved: A medical diagnosis should reduce the legal punishment for an act that is otherwise criminal.
Psychopathia Sexualis, Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1886 (Rebman English adaptation 1906))Resolved: Ivan Ilyich's final peace redeems a wasted life.
The Death of Ivan Ilyich, Leo Tolstoy (1886)Resolved: The Christian virtue of humility is a form of strength rather than a disguised resentment.
On the Genealogy of Morality, Friedrich Nietzsche (1887)Resolved: Ecce Homo should be read as a serious work of philosophy rather than as a symptom of Nietzsche's approaching collapse.
Ecce Homo, Friedrich Nietzsche (written 1888; published 1908)Resolved: Nietzsche is right that the teaching of the church departs fundamentally from the teaching of Jesus.
The Antichrist, Friedrich Nietzsche (written 1888; published 1895)Resolved: Nietzsche is right that morality cannot survive the loss of the faith that founded it.
Twilight of the Idols, Friedrich Nietzsche (1889)Resolved: A person's character is formed more by habit than by deliberate choice.
The Principles of Psychology, William James (1890)Resolved: Captain Vere was right to convene the drumhead court and hang Billy Budd.
Billy Budd and Other Stories, Herman Melville (1924 (written 1886–1891); stories 1850s)Resolved: Innstetten was morally obliged to destroy Crampas's letters and fight no duel.
Effi Briest, Theodor Fontane (1895)Resolved: The case histories in Studies on Hysteria prove less than Breuer and Freud claim for them.
Studies on Hysteria, Josef Breuer and Sigmund Freud (1895 (Brill English translation 1936/1937))Resolved: In Dracula, faith rather than modern science defeats the Count.
Dracula, Bram Stoker (1897)Resolved: The ghosts in The Turn of the Screw are real, and the governess is right about the danger to the children.
The Turn of the Screw and The Aspern Papers, Henry James (1898 / 1888)Resolved: Marlow was right to lie to the Intended about Kurtz's last words.
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad (1899)Resolved: Because no dream can contradict Freud's theory of wish-fulfilment, the theory cannot be scientific.
The Interpretation of Dreams, Sigmund Freud (1899 (dated 1900))Resolved: The charge of the 21st Lancers at Omdurman was folly rather than heroism.
The River War, Winston Churchill (1899)
Early 20th Century (33)
Resolved: Jim's death at Doramin's hand redeems his jump from the Patna.
Lord Jim, Joseph Conrad (1900)Resolved: The value of a religious experience can be judged entirely by its fruits, without asking whether its source is truly divine.
The Varieties of Religious Experience, William James (1902)Resolved: Mental illnesses should be classified chiefly by their course and outcome rather than by their symptoms.
Lectures on Clinical Psychiatry, Emil Kraepelin (1904 English translation)Resolved: Janet's theory of a narrowed field of consciousness explains the symptoms he describes better than any account based on deliberate deception.
The Major Symptoms of Hysteria, Pierre Janet (1907)Resolved: Psychiatric description is incomplete without psychological interpretation of the patient's symptoms.
The Psychology of Dementia Praecox, C. G. Jung (1907 (Peterson/Brill trans. 1909))Resolved: A psychiatric diagnosis should be defined by its present symptoms rather than by its expected outcome.
Dementia Praecox or the Group of Schizophrenias, Eugen Bleuler (1911 (English trans. 1950))Resolved: Mary, not Colin, is the true patient whom the garden heals.
The Secret Garden, Frances Hodgson Burnett (1911)Resolved: The student was right to leave his dying father to go to Sensei.
Kokoro, Natsume Sōseki (1914)Resolved: Demetrio Macias is more admirable than Luis Cervantes.
The Underdogs, Mariano Azuela (1915)Resolved: Jim Burden's life is a failure compared with Ántonia's.
My Ántonia, Willa Cather (1918)Resolved: Hopkins's terrible sonnets are poems of faith rather than poems of despair.
Poems, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1918)Resolved: Siddhartha is right to refuse discipleship to Gotama.
Siddhartha: An Indian Tale, Hermann Hesse (1922)Resolved: The speaker of Twenty Love Poems loves the landscape he makes of the woman more than he loves the woman herself.
Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair, Pablo Neruda (1924)Resolved: I-330 is a liberator rather than a manipulator.
We, Yevgeny Zamyatin (written 1920–1921; first published (English) 1924)Resolved: Parker's wit is a defense against despair rather than a surrender to it.
Complete Poems, Dorothy Parker (1926–1936 (collections))Resolved: Lawrence was justified in encouraging the Arab Revolt while knowing of the Sykes-Picot agreement.
Seven Pillars of Wisdom, T. E. Lawrence (1926)Resolved: Vaillant's warm, restless zeal does more for the mission in New Mexico than Latour's reserved contemplation.
Death Comes for the Archbishop, Willa Cather (1927)Resolved: The narrators of these tales would have been wiser never to investigate.
The Call of Cthulhu and Other Weird Stories, H. P. Lovecraft (1928 (title story))Resolved: Irene Redfield is responsible for Clare Kendry's death.
Passing, Nella Larsen (1929)Resolved: Freud is right that the command to love one's neighbor as oneself asks more than human nature can give.
Civilization and Its Discontents, Sigmund Freud (1930)Resolved: Bernard's final summing-up shows that telling the story of one's life gives it meaning.
The Waves, Virginia Woolf (1931)Resolved: Flora Poste does more good than harm by rearranging the lives of the Starkadders.
Cold Comfort Farm, Stella Gibbons (1932)Resolved: Vera Brittain was right to leave Oxford in 1915 to serve as a nurse.
Testament of Youth, Vera Brittain (1933)Resolved: Weston Liggett bears greater responsibility for Gloria Wandrous's death than Gloria herself.
BUtterfield 8, John O'Hara (1935)Resolved: George's killing of Lennie in Section 6 was an act of mercy.
Of Mice and Men, John Steinbeck (1937)Resolved: Bonhoeffer's reading of the Sermon on the Mount as concrete command cannot be reconciled with his later part in the conspiracy against Hitler.
The Cost of Discipleship, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1937)Resolved: Our Town teaches that human life is most fully understood only after it is over.
Our Town, Thornton Wilder (1938)Resolved: The whisky priest is a saint.
The Power and the Glory, Graham Greene (1940)Resolved: Dr B. was right to play Czentovic a second time.
Chess, Stefan Zweig (1942)Resolved: Bonhoeffer was right to join the conspiracy against Hitler.
Letters and Papers from Prison, Dietrich Bonhoeffer (1943-1945 (published 1951))Resolved: Parker's humor makes her portraits of suffering more truthful, not less.
The Portable Dorothy Parker, Dorothy Parker (1944 (collection))Resolved: Doc is right that the virtues people admire most tend to lead to failure in the world.
Cannery Row, John Steinbeck (1945)Resolved: Bayard Sartoris in An Odor of Verbena acts with more courage than his father, Colonel John Sartoris.
The Portable Faulkner, William Faulkner (1946 (ed. Malcolm Cowley))
Postwar Contemporary (30)
Resolved: Otto Quangel's postcard campaign was a wise act of resistance and not a reckless waste of his and Anna's lives.
Alone in Berlin, Hans Fallada (1947)Resolved: Fantasy literature shows the real world more truly than realistic fiction does.
On Fairy-Stories, J. R. R. Tolkien (1947)Resolved: Willy Loman is destroyed more by his own false dream than by the indifference of the company that fires him.
Death of a Salesman, Arthur Miller (1949)Resolved: Cal Trask bears the chief moral responsibility for Aron's death.
East of Eden, John Steinbeck (1952)Resolved: Mildred Lathbury's life of service is a vocation rather than a confinement.
Excellent Women, Barbara Pym (1952)Resolved: Santiago was wrong to go out so far beyond the other fishermen.
The Old Man and the Sea, Ernest Hemingway (1952)Resolved: Juror Eight was right to keep the jury talking even though he admitted he did not know whether the boy was innocent.
Twelve Angry Men, Reginald Rose (1954 (teleplay))Resolved: The grandmother's final gesture toward the Misfit is a genuine moment of grace.
A Good Man Is Hard to Find and Other Stories, Flannery O'Connor (1955)Resolved: Alfieri is right to admire Eddie for refusing to accept a partial satisfaction of his desires.
A View from the Bridge, Arthur Miller (1955)Resolved: Fowler was justified in helping to bring about Pyle's death.
The Quiet American, Graham Greene (1955)Resolved: Sal is right to leave Dean behind at the end of the novel.
On the Road, Jack Kerouac (1957)Resolved: Querry is beginning to be cured when he dies.
A Burnt-Out Case, Graham Greene (1960)Resolved: A pluralist democracy can endure without a shared public philosophy.
We Hold These Truths, John Courtney Murray (1960)Resolved: King was justified in marching in Birmingham in defiance of a court injunction.
Sermons and Letter from Birmingham Jail, Martin Luther King Jr. (1955-1963)Resolved: Mandela's turn to sabotage was justified once lawful protest had been banned.
I Am Prepared to Die, Nelson Mandela (1964)Resolved: Dignitatis Humanae develops rather than contradicts earlier Catholic teaching on the duties of the state toward religion.
Dignitatis Humanae, Second Vatican Council (1965)Resolved: Woland is a servant of justice rather than an agent of evil.
The Master and Margarita, Mikhail Bulgakov (written 1928–1940; published 1966–1967)Resolved: Henry Pulling is better off at the end of the novel than he was among his dahlias.
Travels with My Aunt, Graham Greene (1969)Resolved: Charlie Citrine betrayed Humboldt.
Humboldt's Gift, Saul Bellow (1975)Resolved: In any contest, accurate orientation matters more than speed of decision.
Destruction and Creation and the OODA Loop Briefings, John Boyd (1976-1995)Resolved: Betonie is right that traditions must change in order to remain alive.
Ceremony, Leslie Marmon Silko (1977)Resolved: A travel writer may embellish real people's stories if doing so tells a deeper truth about a place.
In Patagonia, Bruce Chatwin (1977)Resolved: Barthelme's comedy deepens rather than undercuts the grief in his stories.
Sixty Stories, Donald Barthelme (1981)Resolved: Quinn's disappearance at the end of City of Glass is the result of his own choices rather than the case he was given.
The New York Trilogy, Paul Auster (1985–1986)Resolved: The market economy described in Centesimus Annus section 42 is the economic system most compatible with the dignity of the human person.
Centesimus Annus, John Paul II (1991)Resolved: Mandela was justified in turning from nonviolent defiance to sabotage after all lawful channels of protest were closed.
Long Walk to Freedom, Nelson Mandela (1994)Resolved: A law that permits the taking of innocent human life has no binding moral authority.
Evangelium Vitae, John Paul II (1995)Resolved: In the present age the greater threat to faith is a reason that doubts it can know truth, not a reason that claims to know too much.
Fides et Ratio, John Paul II (1998)Resolved: A family should adopt a new technology only if it strengthens the household and local community it enters.
The Art of the Commonplace, Wendell Berry (2002)Resolved: The modern university should treat theology as a rational discipline alongside the natural sciences.
Regensburg Lecture, Benedict XVI (2006)
Readings
Logic, dialectic, and rhetoric in the library
See also: For Students · Four-year reading list