Symposium

The app opens with empty chairs, on purpose — nobody is chosen for you. Three ways to fill them, and they are different offers rather than one offer three times.

Two to five chairs. You can seat someone mid-conversation with draw up a chair — he arrives into the argument in progress and answers that, not a fresh question.

Sixty curated arguments is a good default and a poor ceiling. When a table turns out to be the one you wanted, keep this table saves who was in it and the questions you want to ask them — during the argument, not only after it, because the evening a table proves itself is the evening you will remember to save it.

Your tables can never shadow or delete a curated one: they are kept apart in the app's own storage and carry their own identifiers. Keeping the same men twice revises the table you already have rather than leaving you two rows you cannot tell apart. A table that names somebody no longer in the roster is withheld from the menu rather than laid short.

Type it, or hold the microphone and speak it. Open the sentence with a name and it goes to that man first — “Marcus, does the fort hold?” — and the rest of the table decides for itself whether to join him.

Everyone at the table is scored on how strongly your question touches what they care about. The strongest reaction leads. The man most opposed to him speaks second — friction is the design, not a side effect. A third joins only with a genuinely different angle.

Each contribution arrives in two or three turns: a short opening that states his answer, then the explanation. That is not a style choice — every turn is spoken the moment it is written, so a short opening reaches you while the rest is still being composed.

Four things you can ask for that a plain question will not produce.

Tap your own portrait and you have asked to speak. The man talking finishes his thought, nobody new begins, and the label under you goes waiting → your turn. Holding the microphone does the same thing and silences the room at once.

For a sitting you cannot attend to — running, driving, cooking. Choose let them talk by themselves before you ask, then ask however you like. The table takes it from there and the toast closes it. Nothing needs tapping again.

It quickens near the close, whatever it started as, so the last round is the end of a movement rather than a sudden change of manner. And it stops early when the argument runs dry — a twenty-minute setting ending at eleven is the table having finished, not a fault. take the floor ends it at the next round boundary.

toast closes the sitting. The table finishes what it was already saying first — the button says letting them finish… while it drains — and then raises a glass.

Carrying one on rebuilds what the philosophers were told: the question, the rounds in the order they happened, and every interjection of yours between them. What is not rebuilt is how strongly each man reacted — those numbers decide who leads a round, they are spent by the time it is over, and inventing them would read as evidence of something. A sitting merely reopened stays a recording, and the screen says which you are looking at.

The sliders icon in the top bar → Kept sittings. Everything you kept is there, newest first, each row showing when it was, how many lines it ran to, whether it was toasted, and who was at it. Reachable between sittings and from the toast — not mid-argument, because opening one replaces what is on screen.

Both land in Files → On My iPhone → Symposium, so an evening can be moved to a computer, backed up, or handed to somebody. Carrying one on needs the archive, so keep it if you think you might want the argument again — keep the whole sitting writes both, and save the voices writes the audio separately.

What they remember

They have met you before

Each sitting is recorded as a gist and read back at the next one, so a philosopher can say “when you were last here you doubted…” — and will not reuse an image or an opening he has already spent on you.

A steelman is recorded as a case put, never as a view held. He argued it because you asked. The same is true of a movement — see below.

How hard they press

Cordial, candid, adversarial

One dial in the settings menu, and a different question from whether anybody's mind changes. A man can be immovable and courteous, or open to persuasion and merciless.

Never in the opening round, whichever way it is set — two men are stating positions and there is nothing yet to press on. Change it mid-argument and it takes effect at the next round.

When somebody gives ground

They can be moved

A table where nobody ever moves is not a symposium; it is five lectures taking turns. So something said in the room — by another philosopher, or by you — can change what a man says next, and the turn is marked when it does.

It is never remembered as his position. He granted something to somebody on one evening; that happened, and you may refer to it. What does not survive is the reading that he now believes it — a philosopher rewritten one concession at a time would drift out of himself over a season of sittings, and nobody would see it happening. It is also rare on purpose: a man who concedes something every round is not open-minded, he is furniture.

The rules they cannot break

Why the citations can be trusted

Every integrity rule here is enforced in code, not merely requested in a prompt. A turn that breaks one is dropped before it can be spoken.

Thirty-five philosophers can be quoted exactly today, across 121 bundled texts: Aristotle, Augustine, Bacon, Berkeley, Comte, Confucius, Darwin, Descartes, Diogenes, Dostoevsky, Douglass, Einstein, Epictetus, Hobbes, Hume, James, Julian, Kant, Leibniz, Locke, Marcus Aurelius, Marx, Mill, Nietzsche, Plato, Pythagoras, Rousseau, Russell, Schopenhauer, Seneca, Socrates, Spinoza, Spooner, Tolstoy and Whitehead. For everyone else, quotation is refused rather than guessed — and you can change that yourself for any of them, by adding a source and fetching it.

Your own material

Giving one of them a source

On the table screen, give one of them a source → the philosopher's name. Then a title, the link, optionally a note on where in it or why it matters, and whether it is a talk or video or something written — and Add it to his library. The sheet lists what he can already cite underneath, so you are not adding a second copy of a book he has.

He may cite it from the next round on, and the control is reachable mid-argument, which is usually when you want it: the moment to hand somebody a source is the moment he has said something it bears on. Swipe a source in that sheet to take it back out.

Video transcripts work well, and are worth knowing about: paste the link to a transcript rather than to the video, and the talk becomes as quotable as a book.

This is the one place the closed library opens, and it is worth being plain about the trade. The researched library is a promise the app makes: somebody checked that the man wrote the book and that the title is the title. A source you add carries no such promise — what it carries instead is an address, which is a stronger guarantee than most footnotes offer, and the reason it can be let in at all.

The roster

A hundred and fifty-nine, in twelve schools

Grouped by where a man stands rather than when he lived. The groups exist to make a menu navigable, not to settle historiography.

Forty-four of them are alive. Those carry a standing disclosure: a living person can be got wrong in public, by name, and be around to see it — so the screen says plainly that this is a construction from published work and that he has not been consulted.

Two Simones, three Thomases

Calling a man by name

Where a given name is shared, everyone who shares it takes a surname initial — Karl M and Karl P, Simone W and Simone B, Thomas H, Thomas A and Thomas K.

The bare name reaches nobody, deliberately. Guessing between two men is worse than asking again, and you would hear the wrong one answer with no sign that anything had gone wrong.

Spelling is no help. Georg Cantor and George Berkeley are one name across a table, and dictation picks a spelling for you — so neither given name reaches anybody while both are seated, and each is addressed by surname. A name a letter or two out still finds its man (Larkin reaches Larken Rose), but never when it could find two.

Voices

Who sounds like whom

The phone's own voices work with no setup and no cost. Cloud voices are better and are billed per character; the server holds the key and enforces a daily budget, so the system voices take over rather than the table going quiet.

Give your name and they will use it — sparingly, once or twice an evening, at the moment a man turns to you. A name in every turn is the register of a hold queue and would undo the thing it was added for.

When something goes wrong

What the messages mean

One thing to know

The roster ships with the app

Philosophers, curated tables and bundled texts are compiled into the app itself. There is no database and nothing downloads in the background. Anyone added since your last install is not there until you build again — which is worth remembering the day a search comes back empty for a man you know exists.