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A forum for high school Lincoln-Douglas debate.


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mhassin
JohnnyFontane
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    Death of philosophy in debate?

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    JohnnyFontane
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    Post  JohnnyFontane Mon Feb 23, 2009 6:46 pm

    Is it just me, or has anyone else seen a severe decline in the use of philosophy (especially in the critical tradition) in circuit debate rounds? It seems like there is a pretty severe swing where few debaters are now using/winning with critical arguments, or at the very least cards from authors like Derrida and Zizek play a less important role in the debate. Is this a good thing? I know everyone hates skepticism, but I feel like there should be some compromise.
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    Post  mhassin Tue Feb 24, 2009 2:50 pm

    JohnnyFontane wrote:Is it just me, or has anyone else seen a severe decline in the use of philosophy (especially in the critical tradition) in circuit debate rounds? It seems like there is a pretty severe swing where few debaters are now using/winning with critical arguments, or at the very least cards from authors like Derrida and Zizek play a less important role in the debate. Is this a good thing? I know everyone hates skepticism, but I feel like there should be some compromise.

    it just depends on the topic, the icc topic is obviously empirically based so no one is running critical or classical philosophy

    on the other hand everyone ran some kind of philosophical arguments on the sept/oct innocents topic, you didn't have much choice
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    Post  Old Tue Feb 24, 2009 6:41 pm

    The November/December topic was full of K's probably because of a lack of neg literature. I think K's are just as educational as any other kind of debate, but I don't think they're the most strategic choice given that LD judges do not have a consistent paradigm and that K's bad theory and T spec (if you don't know what you're talking about) are a pain.
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    poneill
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    Post  poneill Tue Feb 24, 2009 8:04 pm

    mhassin wrote:
    JohnnyFontane wrote:Is it just me, or has anyone else seen a severe decline in the use of philosophy (especially in the critical tradition) in circuit debate rounds? It seems like there is a pretty severe swing where few debaters are now using/winning with critical arguments, or at the very least cards from authors like Derrida and Zizek play a less important role in the debate. Is this a good thing? I know everyone hates skepticism, but I feel like there should be some compromise.

    it just depends on the topic, the icc topic is obviously empirically based so no one is running critical or classical philosophy

    on the other hand everyone ran some kind of philosophical arguments on the sept/oct innocents topic, you didn't have much choice

    Really? I've run Colonialism; seen Glover/empricism as a moral theory run; saw an aff whose authors were MacIntyre, Wittingstein, and Kant; heard of someone reading malthus, and if you know where to look, both Derrida (implicitly) and Zizek (explicitly) affirm this topic. Derrida's stuff on the new international would make for a really interesting aff case, and you can sure bet a lot of zizek's criticism of the bush administration deals with I law and accountability (he even talks about the ICC in one of his books). People are reading Borders K affs, cosmopolitanism, and hell, even Hobbes (or at least, Hobbesean authors). This topic is jack full of philosophy, in addition to IR Theory args (which are philosophical, just more empirically based).
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    Post  P.Rai Sun Mar 08, 2009 11:11 pm

    i don't see what is so wrong with a decline in critical debate so long as the degree of philosophical debate in general does not decrease. Authors like Butler and Zizek alot of times are not very substantive in their explanations of their theories, especially in light of the standards we hold as a debate commmunity for warranting arguments explicitly. I think debaters would learn alot from pushing themselves to defend philosophical positions that do not rely on descriptions and connotations, but rather emphasize rigor and deductive proof. This type of shift would also limit ambiguous dehumanization/otherization debates, which are almost always terrible to listen to and worse to have to evaluate.
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    Post  cherymenthol Thu Jun 10, 2010 6:20 pm

    I do agree that the community has become less critical but I am going to try and fix that next year by re-inventing the K.
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    Post  TomC Thu Jun 10, 2010 10:20 pm

    Philosophy ≠ Ks...You just write crazy shit =P
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    Post  cherymenthol Fri Jun 11, 2010 12:10 pm

    TomC wrote:Philosophy ≠ Ks...You just write crazy shit =P

    lol.

    But Ks are the purest venue of philosophy in debate, if they're not my Ks.
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    Post  TomC Fri Jun 11, 2010 1:30 pm

    cherymenthol wrote:
    TomC wrote:Philosophy ≠ Ks...You just write crazy shit =P

    lol.

    But Ks are the purest venue of philosophy in debate, if they're not my Ks.

    You said you'd introduce philosophy via re-inventing the K...you're "reinvention" isn't philo quite as much =D

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