Essays as discourse

Lots of old philosophy essays are written as a discussion between two or more people. I think this is a fun way to write essays, and i would like to try doing more of it myself.

One of the potentially problematic aspects of it, which is also one of the fun parts of it, is whereas in a regular essay you tend to have to actually argue your point, by framing something as a discourse, you can just make your opponent say really stupid things and pretend that as a result their whole argument is stupid.

Of course this isn’t good practice, but it’s not uncommon to see. Plato is a good example: i feel that several of his discourses are unfairly biased towards Socrates at the expense of everyone else. Socrates is the unassuming genius, and everyone else thinks that they’re the best until Socrates destroys and humiliates them (kindly of course).

This doesn’t have to be the case, and i think the best use of discourses is when the writer uses the various mouthpieces they have created to really try and understand why someone might hold that view. Rather than being an abstract argument, which everyone will interpret differently and have preconceptions about, giving the arguments voices helps to humanise them.

If we take that as a basic premise, that everyone is trying to do their best, maybe we can have more reasonable discussions about sensitive topics.