The questions are, however, artificial, carefully composed imitations of disputations, not tied to any actual oral debate as true disputed questions are.
Plato institutionalized such disputations into structured, rule-governed verbal contests that became known as dialectical argument.
The remaining sections of the Metaphysical Disputations are centrally and recognizably discussions of kinds of being: infinite being, that is, God; finite being, what is created by God; and then the nature and features of finite beings, again as delineated by a theory of categories: substance and accident, and then all of the kinds of accident there may be.
The fifteen disputations in which Suárez explores these matters (DM XII XXVII) consequently contain extended, intricate discussions of each of the four causes, as well as detailed explorations of how each cause effects its causality on a specific occasion.
Each of the four causes receives it own extended treatment in the sections of the Metaphysical Disputations dedicated to the causes of being (DM XII XXVII).
Cicero's Tusculan Disputations, books III and IV take up the question of whether it is possible and desirable to rid oneself of the emotions.
And he practiced the art of logic not only in short debates but also in continuous disputations, in which both sides of the question were discussed.
According to Wiredu (1996: 182ff), such independent and critical thinking was available in varying forms in Akan communities and was the basis of frequently protracted disputations among elders in search of a consensus regarding matters that required negotiations.
Later they formed an important element of scholarly training in universities, featuring in different kinds of disputations: on a basic level the sophismata served to illustrate a theory, but they were also used to test the limits of a theory.
Besides these different kinds of treatises (the boundaries of which, however, are not very clear), we also find collections of sophismata that seem to be reports of oral disputations.
Building on Harbsmeier's insight that the historical context of Gongsun Long's disputations has been insufficiently appreciated, we should suspect that these remarks signal interpretive charity gone too far.
