Forbidden Conversations

by Eric Dietrich

This book contains a series of conversations, rendered in the form of a dialogue, between three friends on topics which Americans are actively prevented from discussing, except perhaps in private, behind closed doors. The prevention of these discussions is destructive both to American social discourse and to the future of our democracy.

Dialogues are not plays. They are an ancient and venerable pedagogical technique for introducing controversial or difficult subjects, and have been used to great effect by well known philosophers. Easier to read than essays, dialogues should not be confused with the sort of conversations one finds in novels or movies. George Berkeley skillfully used the dialogue format to introduce his radical form of the notion that everything that exists depends upon minds for that very existence. In 1632, the great Galileo famously used a dialogue to argue for the heliocentric theory of the solar system. His book Dialogue Concerning the Two Chief World Systems was so powerful and controversial that Galileo was convicted of heresy by the Catholic Inquisition.

Though the topics of the conversations recorded herein are themselves quite controversial, the fact that they are now in your hands is due to something even more one of the participants of these conversations died in an effort to bring them to the reading public. Whether that death and its accompanying violence were worth it, we will leave to the reader to decide.

133 pages, Kindle Edition

Published March 18, 2013

About the author

Eric Dietrich is a professor of philosophy at Binghamton University. Before studying philosophy, he was a concert pianist and mountain climber. He has a bachelor's degree in mathematics from the University of Wyoming, and a doctorate in philosophy from the University of Arizona. Between those two degrees, he worked for a Nasa/Defense Department contractor in their artificial intelligence unit. He is the author of numerous papers, most recently focusing on paraconsistent logic and true contradictions. His most-read paper is "There is no progress in philosophy" (Essays in Philosophy, vol. 12 iss. 2, 2011; http://commons.pacificu.edu/eip/vol12...). With Tara Fox Hall, he wrote "The Allure of the Serial Killer," which came out in the book Serial Killers, edited by Sara Waller. He co-authored Sisyphus's Boulder: Consciousness and the Limits of the Knowable, a book on consciousness's resistance to scientific explanation. He also edits the Journal of Experimental and Theoretical Artificial Intelligence.