Tonycurzonprice's Favorite Links on debate from Diigo

Smell the coffee - Times Online

Mon, 05 Nov 2007 14:04:42 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

The eighteenth-century coffee house was undoubtedly a great vehicle for the reading of newspapers. A Continental observer in the late eighteenth century noted that, whereas the French coffee house was a place where games were played, in Britain “you neither see billiards nor backgammon tables” because people frequent coffee houses principally to read “the PAPERS”. There was a close and sometimes volatile relationship between the coffee-men and the newspaper-men, which came to a head in 1728, when the coffee-men launched an abortive scheme for setting up their own newspapers. Coffee shops had long been used as places for reading papers without having to pay for them. The coffee-men resented the high price of newspapers and the fact that there were so many of them. The newspaper-men objected that coffee houses relied on newspapers to attract custom. There is a comparable symbiosis now between cafés and information, whether in the form of newspapers (Starbucks has an exclusive deal with The Times, Costa with the Daily Telegraph) or internet connection. It is hard to see which party owes most to whom. As a pamphleteer of 1729 wrote, “Papers mutually beget company, and Company papers”.

The freedom of speech led to time-wasting and “gabbling” (“Here men carried by instinct sipp muddy water, and like Frogs confusedly murmur Insignificant Notes, which tickle their own ears, and, to their inharmonious sense, make Music of jarring strings”). The education on offer was “a school . . . without a master”.

As the cultural historian Markman Ellis writes, in Eighteenth-Century Coffee-House Culture, the British coffee house, a “heady combination of news, literature, debate and writing”, was “the central locus of newly egalitarian practices of discussion and conversation, including forms of structured discourse, such as lectures and debates, as well as unregulated discourse, such as gossip and chatter”.

Tags: debate macarthur

Posted by: tonycurzonprice

The Row Boat

Sat, 27 Oct 2007 06:10:59 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Creating a wider conversation really means expanding our love. Thinking harder really means building trust. It is an economy of exchange and a performance whose purpose is to reveal something transforming. Unlike Rousseau at openDemocracy, I am not interested in generating agreement and discovering the "General Will." Rather, it is discovering the fact that we are all sharing a room together and we have to learn how to get along.

Tags: debate tcp

Posted by: tonycurzonprice

Representativeness and deliberation « Spartakan

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 00:53:22 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

And the second item in OpenDemocracy (continuing with JS Mill) is a light-weight but readable overview of the different perspectives on debates:

The cheap-talk challenge: what is debate really for? | openDemocracy

Views of debate, comparing Plato, JS Mill, Arendt, Habermas and Cmdr Taco “The space of dialogue either selects the group that already is relevantly equal, or it withers away.”

(tags: democracy internet participation article philosophy)

Models of debates varying from elitist shaping of the commoners’ opinions, through to expecting them to reflect a community’s consensus(es).

Tags: debate tcp

Posted by: tonycurzonprice

The Internet Classics Archive | Meno by Plato

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 07:48:57 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Soc. He is Greek, and speaks Greek, does he not?

Tags: debate knowledge truth

Posted by: tonycurzonprice

Autobiography by John Stuart Mill : four

Sun, 22 Oct 2006 07:32:26 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

We determined to meet once a fortnight from November to June, at the Freemasons' Tavern, and we had soon a splendid list of members, containing, along with several members of parliament, nearly all the most noted speakers of the Cambridge Union and of the Oxford United Debating Society. It is curiously illustrative of the tendencies of the time, that our principal difficulty in recruiting for the Society was to find a sufficient number of Tory speakers. Almost all whom we could press into the service were Liberals, of different orders and degrees. Besides those already named, we had Macaulay, Thirlwall, Praed, Lord Howick, Samuel Wilberforce (afterwards Bishop of Oxford), Charles Poulett Thomson (afterwards Lord Sydenham), Edward and Henry Lytton Bulwer, Fonblanque, and many others whom I cannot now recollect, but who made themselves afterwards more or less conspicuous in public or literary life. Nothing could seem more promising.

Tags: debate mill

Posted by: tonycurzonprice

ПОЛИТ.РУ

Mon, 16 Oct 2006 02:25:47 -0000

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Президент Израиля Моше Кацав может быть обвинен в изнасиловании, сексуальных домогательствах в отношении нескольких женщин, главным образом сотрудниц своего офиса, а также в том, что удовлетворял необоснованные прошения о помиловании и незаконно прослушивал телефонные разговоры. Официальное решение о возможности судебного преследования президента будет принимать генеральный прокурор.

Tags: debate news od russia

Posted by: tonycurzonprice

Reading Leo Strauss: Politics, Philosophy, Judaism by Steven B. Smith, an excerpt

Sun, 27 Aug 2006 05:03:32 -0000

Comments:

strauss views debate as a way of obfuscating, layering, masking the truth posted by tonycurzonprice

Highlights and Sticky Notes:

Was its source in Plato’s artful use of the Socratic dialogue to convey various meanings to different readers without actually speaking in his own name?

Tags: debate forums speech

Posted by: tonycurzonprice