PRACTICES, NOT THEORY.
36 guided practices · Short, concrete exercises drawn from the traditions Mull surfaces. Each one takes 5–25 minutes. Start anywhere.
The 60-second case
◐ Medium · 15–25 minCompress your argument until 60 seconds is enough.
Contemplative
Introspective practices drawn from the Stoic, Buddhist, and monastic traditions. Short, structured, deliberately quiet.
- Premortem10–15 min
Imagine the failure of your plan in vivid detail before you start.
Stoic / decision theory (Gary Klein, after Seneca) - Negative visualization5–10 min
Imagine losing what you have, briefly and concretely, to remember it's a gift.
Stoic (Marcus Aurelius, Epictetus, Seneca) - Socratic self-questioning15–25 min
Take one strongly-held belief and walk it through five 'why' questions.
Socratic (Plato's dialogues) - View from above5 min
Mentally zoom out — your city, your country, the planet — and look back at your day.
Stoic (Marcus Aurelius) - The Examen10–15 min
Five-step Ignatian end-of-day review — what was given, what was missed, what to take into tomorrow.
Ignatian (Jesuit, but works secular) - Memento mori5–10 min
A short, deliberate confrontation with mortality. Clarifying.
Stoic, Buddhist, monastic Christian - Morning intention3–5 min
Begin the day by naming what you're bringing to it, not what you want from it.
Stoic - Three-line evening2–3 min
A nightly review compressed to its three honest sentences.
Stoic (modern compression) - Metta (loving-kindness)8–15 min
Buddhist practice for extending warmth — first to yourself, then outward in widening circles.
Theravada Buddhist (with modern adaptations) - Breath count to ten5–20 min
The simplest concentration practice in the Zen toolkit. Most people fail before five.
Zen - Mindful eating10–25 min (one meal)
One meal eaten with full attention. Reveals how rarely you taste what you eat.
Buddhist (Vipassana lineage) - Letter to your future self20–40 min
Write to who you'll be in one year, five years, ten. Discover what you most want to tell them.
Universal contemplative - Body scan15–30 min
Slow attention to each region of the body. Returns you to the only place you actually live.
Modern (Kabat-Zinn) + ancient (Vipassana, Yoga Nidra)
Logic
Sharpen the moves themselves: spot fallacies, structure inferences, pressure-test your own reasoning.
- Fallacy hunt15–25 min
Pick a real argument from the wild and find three reasoning errors in it.
Critical thinking (Aristotelian fallacy taxonomy onward) - Steelmanning the opposite20–40 min
Write the strongest possible version of the view you most reject.
Analytic philosophy (Daniel Dennett, after the principle of charity) - Counterexample drill15–20 min
Try to break a moral rule with a single concrete case.
Analytic ethics (the trolley-problem tradition) - Argument mapping20–30 min
Draw the structure of an argument as boxes and arrows. See its load-bearing walls.
Informal logic, critical thinking pedagogy - Reductio ad absurdum15–25 min
Take a claim seriously, run it to its logical limit, see if you still believe it.
Greek (Zeno, Plato), surviving across all of analytic philosophy - Burden-of-proof check5–10 min
Most arguments lose because the wrong side is being asked to prove the wrong thing.
Analytic philosophy - Necessary vs sufficient5 min
A confusion that's killed more arguments than any fallacy.
Analytic logic - Modus tollens practice5–10 min
The classical denying-the-consequent move. The fastest way to spot a broken conditional.
Classical logic - Bayesian update10–15 min
New evidence in. How much should the belief move? Probability done responsibly.
Bayesian epistemology - Naming hidden premises10 min
Most arguments don't state their assumptions. The fastest way to refute one is to make them visible.
Argumentation theory - Ockham's razor5–10 min
When two theories explain the same evidence, prefer the one with fewer entities. A scalpel, not a club.
Scholastic + scientific - Disjunction elimination5 min
When you know it's A or B, and you can rule out one, the other is forced.
Classical logic
Argument
Practical exercises in forming, delivering, and defending arguments — what philosophers actually do with each other.
- The 60-second case15–25 min
Compress your argument until 60 seconds is enough.
Rhetoric (think the elevator pitch, but slower) - Anticipating objections20–35 min
For every position, list the three strongest objections — then answer them.
Aquinas (Summa structure: objection, sed contra, response) - Translation under constraint20–30 min
Rephrase a complex argument for a 12-year-old, then for a skeptic, then for an adversary.
Pedagogy + rhetoric (Feynman technique generalized) - Dialectical loop25–40 min
Thesis → strongest antithesis → synthesis. Hegel's move, made walkable.
Hegelian dialectic, refined by Marx and many others - Switch sides30–45 min
Argue both sides of a debate, alternating, until you no longer know which side you started on.
Sophistic / dialectical (Protagoras, antilogic) - Charitable interpretation10 min
Before arguing against a position, prove you understand it well enough that its holder would say "yes, that's it."
Analytic + virtue epistemology - Concession-and-counter5–10 min
A rhetorical structure that builds trust before it pushes back.
Classical rhetoric - Ideological Turing test15–30 min
Argue an opponent's view well enough that strangers can't tell you're not a believer.
Modern (Bryan Caplan, 2011) + classical (Plato's Socratic method) - Reframing the disagreement10–15 min
When two people argue past each other, the disagreement is usually deeper than either is naming.
Dialectic + therapy - Stoic preview10 min
Before a hard conversation, rehearse the worst version of how it could go. Then walk in.
Stoic (premeditatio malorum) - The ten-word version5–10 min
Compress your argument to ten words. The compression forces honesty.
Modern (precis writing, Hemingway, Anglo-American journalism)
These are starter exercises. More to come, including ones with built-in reflection prompts that feed your map. If you want something specific added, write to jimmy.kaian.ji@gmail.com.