Dialogues with Giants is a book of short, combative essays, each followed by a staged debate in which history's major thinkers take on the essay's thesis. Freud, Marx, Popper, Russell, Veblen, John Stuart Mill, Adam Smith, Sartre, Jung, Kernberg, Kuczynski, Descartes, Darwin, Nietzsche, Peirce and others argue, concede, and dig in, and the result is philosophy as it is actually done: positions stated plainly and then put under pressure from the minds best equipped to break them.
The subjects range across psychology, philosophy, economics and the sociology of institutions. Why do Great Books programs punish the student who actually uses Aristotle? Why do aging novelists ripen while aging comedians stop being funny? Why were witch hunts a release valve for local repression? Why do psychopaths lack not fear but the fear of fear? How can a cult coerce its members without a leader? Why does being right buy no rank in academic philosophy, and why can't a philosopher even plagiarize wholeheartedly? Why does the childish story win over the true one?
Other chapters take on technical questions directly: the failure of formal logics, the confusion of conditionals with probabilities, the preface paradox, the asymmetry of explanation and prediction, and Popper's falsifiability criterion set against the claim that what makes a belief scientific is its provenance, not any property of the proposition itself. The book closes with Bernie Madoff's complaint that the system leaves no room for "the little guy," read as a diagnosis of the individual against the impersonal collective.
The unifying concern is how institutions, status hierarchies and belief systems sustain themselves independently of whether they are true. Each chapter states a position without hedging and then lets the giants push back.
