Debby

Debby

The Library of Resolved Debates

Take every worldview at its strongest, then follow the argument all the way down.

Debby maps debates claim by claim until each chain reaches the ground it actually stands on — and publishes the questions it could not close as plainly as the ones it could.

Searches everything public — cases, open questions, maps, people, terms. Word-based and free; nothing here spends AI credits. Paste a YouTube link and it opens the analyzer instead.

Or take the worldview testA Socratic interview across six foundations — answer questions, watch your Coherence Wheel fill in.Start the interview →

Response Atlas · The Field

The field of published answers

From antiquity to now — era bands, tradition clusters, and the reply lineages that cross them on one chronology. Research draft, not a Library verdict.

Explore the Field →Lineages

Preview · 879 works · research draft

Private research workspace

Let two vaults illuminate each other

Bring two Obsidian research vaults into one private reading desk. Reveal shared sources, disagreements and tensions, missing support, and useful connections across your notes.

  • Read related notes side by side
  • Follow the neighborhood around a connection
  • You decide what to keep, import, reject, or research further
Cross-reference vaults
Vault oneVault two
Selected neighborhood
A diagram of two research vaults shown as separate organic note fields. Restrained bridges mark shared sources and useful correspondences. One connected neighborhood is selected for focused side-by-side reading.

Debby is written from an Eastern Orthodox conviction and holds every position — including its own — to the same rubric. Where a case is unfinished, the page says so.

+ Where these 10 traditions come from — hover a marker on the globe, or read the list
  • Eastern Orthodox ChristianityConstantinople · 1st century onward; doctrine settled 325–787

    No single founder · Athanasius of Alexandria, Basil the Great, Gregory of Nazianzus, Maximus the Confessor, John of Damascus

  • Sunni IslamMecca, Ḥijāz · 7th century

    Prophet · Muhammad (c. 570–632); later al-Ashʿarī, al-Ghazālī, Ibn Taymiyyah

  • ProtestantismWittenberg, Saxony · 16th century

    Founder · Martin Luther; then Zwingli in Zürich and Calvin in Geneva

  • Theravāda BuddhismBodh Gayā, Magadha · 5th century BC; canon written down 1st century BC

    Founder · Siddhartha Gautama, the Buddha; Buddhaghosa, who wrote the standard commentaries

  • Advaita VedāntaKalady, Kerala · traditionally 8th century, reading far older texts

    Systematiser · Ādi Śaṅkara; Gauḍapāda before him

  • Materialist AtheismAbdera, Thrace · 5th century BC, argued again from the 1770s

    No founder · Leucippus and Democritus; much later d'Holbach, Marx, Dennett, Rosenberg

  • Agnosticism / NaturalismLondon · the word dates from 1869; the stance is ancient

    Named by · T. H. Huxley, who coined the word; Pyrrho and Hume for the older ancestry

  • DeismParis · 17th–18th century

    First systematic statement · Edward Herbert, Baron Herbert of Cherbury; later Voltaire and Thomas Paine

  • Roman CatholicismRome · 1st century onward; papal primacy defined 1870

    No single founder · Augustine of Hippo, Thomas Aquinas, Anselm of Canterbury, John Henry Newman

  • JudaismJerusalem · tradition places Abraham c. 2000 BC; Sinai and Moses traditionally 13th century BC

    Foundational figures · Abraham; Moses; later Hillel, Rabbi Akiva, Maimonides

10 traditions, because that is what Debby has profile pages for. The globe is a map of the library’s coverage, not a scoreboard — no marker is marked as winning anything.

On the shelves today

What you can read right now

A curated map, three unfinished working cases, a method-in-action narrative, and the Atlas. Nothing below invents a closed Library verdict.

1

Curated map

4

Working cases

94

Atlas entries

3

Interlocutors

Curated mapTheology · 7 nodes

Can materialism account for the preconditions of intelligibility — logic, mathematics, morality?

The Transcendental Argument for God (TAG) tests whether materialism can account for the preconditions of intelligibility — logic, mathematics, morality, and the uniformity of nature.

Eastern Orthodox ChristianityagainstMaterialist Atheism
Open the map →
Argument incomplete

Can a transcendental argument reach the world, or only our beliefs?

The argument that God must exist because reasoning would otherwise be impossible is stronger than its critics allow and weaker than a one-step proof of the whole faith. The popular version states the fatal objection out loud, then answers it with the thing that was in dispute. Orthodoxy’s own sources offer a richer account of mind–world fit. This page is an early stage in a network of arguments. Even at its strongest, if the belief-to-world bridges hold, the stage would press toward a real ground for logic and knowledge. That licenses later arguments for which ground, which revelation, and which church. It does not by itself make any specific theology true.

Read case →Specialists still disagree

What would settle the IQ hereditarianism debate?

On a two-hour podcast, the philosopher Nathan Cofnas made the strongest popular case currently running for a genetic contribution to group differences in IQ. This page pairs each load-bearing claim with the papers behind it and the strongest published counters, checks the citations themselves, and stops where the evidence stops.

Read case →Argument incomplete

Can anything ground a moral obligation that actually binds?

Everyone in this argument can tell you what the good is. Nobody has yet shown why it obligates a person who declines it. Orthodoxy, naturalism and Islamic theology each hit the same wall in the same place, which is either a scandal or a sign that the question has been mis-posed.

Read case →Argument incomplete

Why exactly three divine persons?

Christians have been asked “why three?” for eighteen centuries. Following the best answers all the way down proves one thing solidly, fails to prove the thing everybody wants, and arrives at the position Eastern Orthodoxy’s own dogmatics already held — which is that no proof of it was ever available.

Read case →
Method in action

Sher vs. Orthodoxy — the same rubric on both sides

Read the narrative →

The working shelf

Questions we have not closed

These are live research maps, drafted by Debby and not yet reviewed by a person. We publish them unfinished on purpose — a library that only shows its wins is an advertisement.

Argument incompleteEpistemology · drafted by Debby, unreviewed

Can a transcendental argument reach the world, or only our beliefs?

The strongest case

The classic argument runs: for anyone to reason at all, certain things must already be true, so those things are true of the world, not merely believed by us. Orthodoxy’s stronger form is participation: one Logos contains the reason-principles of creatures, so mind and world can fit without the pairing being an accident, if that theological picture is true.

What it still does not settle

We have not shown how the argument crosses from what a thinker must presuppose to what is actually the case outside the thinker. A critic can grant that we cannot help believing it and stop there, and at least one worked-out rival grounds objective logic in the world’s own structure without asserting a divine mind at all. This page is an early stage: even at its strongest, if those bridges hold, it would press toward a real ground and license later arguments for which ground, which revelation, and which church.

Read the full case →9 sections · about 21 min
Argument incompleteTheology · drafted by Debby, unreviewed

Why exactly three divine persons?

The strongest case

Under the revised exam Debby now uses: if the origin-relations are real, the three are distinct; the roster is received, not derived from unaided reason; independent lines converge on three as a minimum, not a fence; and named rivals were scored on that same bar. The Orthodox account is Cappadocian — including Beau Branson as Orthodox — not Richard Swinburne’s social Trinity.

What it still does not settle

The old exam — prove from reason that there must be exactly three, and that a fourth is impossible — is declined, not passed. Uniqueness of which revelation, and which personal inventory, is still open. Shape of relating is still not a headcount. This page is not a Library verdict that only Christianity or only Eastern Orthodoxy can ground the count.

Read the full case →17 sections · about 57 min
Argument incompleteEthics · drafted by Debby, unreviewed

Can anything ground a moral obligation that actually binds?

The strongest case

On the Orthodox account the good is not a preference or a reward scheme: it is what a rational creature is for, so turning from it is a misuse of one’s own nature rather than a mere failure to score well on someone else’s scale.

What it still does not settle

The primary texts describe that order beautifully without establishing that it binds someone who refuses the framework. A proposal to change that demand was considered and rejected: the original, harder question still stands, and nobody has closed it.

Read the full case →10 sections · about 17 min

Nothing on this shelf is a Library verdict. Debby proposes; a person decides what gets published. See every open question →

The method

How Debby reads an argument

The same three moves on every transcript, every worldview, every time.

I

State the case at its strongest

Before anything is criticised, each position is rebuilt in the form its own best defender would sign. A refutation of a weak version refutes nothing.

II

Separate what was said from what follows

Every line is marked as a quote, an inference drawn from it, or a judgment we are making. You can always see which of the three you are reading.

III

Follow the chain to where it ends

Every justification terminates somewhere: a foundation, a circle, or an endless regress. We record the terminus each side actually reaches — including when that is nowhere yet.

The instructions are public

The rules Debby analyses under are published in full, not summarised. You can read them before you trust a single map.

Read the method

Try it

Three ways in

One takes a minute and needs no account. Another puts the pipeline to work on a debate you choose. The third builds a map of your own view instead of someone else's.

Find where you stand

Twelve questions on the foundations — truth, knowledge, morality, meaning. It names the tradition your answers sit closest to and where your own reasoning is thinnest. No account needed.

Take the worldview test

Analyze a lecture or debate

Paste a YouTube link. Debby pulls the transcript, reconstructs each speaker’s argument, marks quote against inference, and traces the chain to its terminus. Sign in first — analysis runs on metered models.

Open the analyzer

Build your own worldview

A Socratic interview across six foundations, filling in a Coherence Wheel as you answer — grounded in Debby’s own corpus, not re-derived from scratch. Sign in first — it spends metered LLM credit per turn.

Start the interview

Talk to us

Tell us where we are wrong

This is a small project with an open method, which makes outside pressure useful rather than annoying. Corrections, suggestions, and offers of help all go to the same place — and a person reads them.

Suggest or correct

A feature, a clause the analysis prompt should carry, a debate worth mapping, or a line in a published map that gets an argument wrong.

Send a suggestion →

Help build it

Engineering, research, editing, adjudication. The method is public precisely so someone other than us can work against it.

Offer to help →

Just get in touch

Questions about the project, the rubric, or what Debby will and will not claim. No form-letter replies — a person answers.

Contact the founder →

“The unexamined life is not worth living.”

Socrates, in Plato’s Apology

♦

Why Debby exists

Debates are won by rhetoric and confidence. The audience goes home remembering how a speaker carried himself, not whether the argument held. Points are forgotten, fallacies go untagged, and the same ground is fought over again a year later.

Debby is an attempt at the opposite: a written record where each chain is traced once, carefully, and kept. Where a case succeeds, the map shows why. Where it fails — including ours — the map shows that too.

We hold that truth is real and can be pursued by argument. That conviction obliges us to state the other side’s case well enough that they would recognise it, and to be honest when our own case is not yet finished.

How to read a mapStart with one debate