The Art of Controversy

Schopenhauer drafted The Art of Controversy in the 1830s but never published it in his lifetime — perhaps because few books are so honest about how arguments are actually won. He catalogues thirty-eight stratagems of "dialectical eristic," the dirty tricks by which clever people defeat better thinkers in public debate: shifting definitions mid-argument, attacking the man instead of the claim, drawing the opponent into absurd extensions, calling for shame, declaring oneself misunderstood, and on through the rest. Read straight, it is a field manual for any debate; read sideways, it is a devastating portrait of the human animal at its most rhetorical. First published posthumously in 1864 and translated by T. Bailey Saunders in 1896.