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Scientific Irrationalism
In fewer than two-hundred pages, David Stove leaves the well-established and widely regarded edifice of the academic philosophy of science in smoldering ruins. This book provides a modern history of scientific reasoning, from David Hume’s inductive skepticism to Karl Popper’s outright denial of induction, to the increasingly irrational and absurd scientific views that followed. When Popper untethered science from induction, Stove argues, he triggered a postmodernist nightmare of utter nonsense culminating in Paul Feyerabend’s summation that “anything goes” when it comes to defining or describing science. With undeniable logic, a deft analysis of the linguistic slight-of-hand that m...
Scientific Irrationalism
Little known outside his native Australia, David Stove was one of the most illuminating and brilliant philosophical essayists of his era. A fearless attacker of intellectual and cultural orthodoxies, Stove left powerful critiques of scientific irrationalism, Darwinian theories of human behavior, and philosophical idealism. Since its inception in the 1940s, the field of science studies, originally intended to bridge the gap between science and the humanities, has been the center of controversy and debate. The most notable figures in this debate are Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. In Scientific Irrationalism, now available in paperback, David Stove demonstrates how extravagant has been the verbia...
On Enlightenment
The idea of enlightenment entails liberty, equality, rationalism, secularism, and the connection between knowledge and well being. In spite of the setbacks of revolutionary violence, mass murder, and two world wars, the spread of enlightenment values is still the yardstick by which moral, political, and scientific advances are measured. In On Enlightenment, David Stove attacks the roots of enlightenment thought to define its successes, limitations, and areas of likely failures. Stove champions the use of reason and recognizes the falsity of religious claims as well as the importance of individual liberty. He rejects the enlightenment's uncritical optimism regarding social progress and its wi...
Against the Idols of the Age
"Stove was undoubtedly the most stylish and witty writer of all philosphers of the last one hundred years, if not of all time. When it comes to attacking the absurdities of twentieth century intellectual movements no one else came close, and certainly no one else was as funny. The greatest iconoclast of the twentieth century, we can now see in retrospect, was not any of the European avant-garde, most of whom in fact, epitomized the spirit of the century perfectly, but this no nonsense Australian. His greatest contributions were in the philosophy of science, in particular in his defense of inductive reasoning, and in his attack on the sort of irrationalism manifested by his four horsemen, Pop...
The Plato Cult
This is a book of philosophy, written by a philosopher and intended for anyone who knows enough philosophy to have been seriously injured, antagonised, mystified or intoxicated by it. Stove is passionately polemical, a philosophical counterpart to Tom Wolfe. Setting out to deflate a few philosophical reputations, he lambastes both the dead (Plato, Hegel, Kant, Foucault) and the living (Popper, Nozick, Feyerabend, Goodman). Yet he says things that need to be said, and that others often lack the courage to say.
Darwinian Fairytales
Whatever your opinion of ‘Intelligent Design,’ you’ll find Stove’s criticism of what he calls ‘Darwinism’ difficult to stop reading. Stove’s blistering attack on Richard Dawkins’ ‘selfish genes’ and ‘memes’ is unparalleled and unrelenting. A discussion of spiders who mimic bird droppings is alone worth the price of the book. Darwinian Fairytales should be read and pondered by anyone interested in sociobiology, the origin of altruism, and the awesome process of evolution. --Martin Gardner, author of Did Adam and Eve Have Navels?: Debunking Pseudoscience
Popper and After
Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists focuses on a tendency in the philosophy of science, of which the leading representatives are Professor Sir Karl Popper, the late Professor Imre Lakatos, and Professors T. S. Kuhn and P. K. Feyerabend. Their philosophy of science is in substance irrationalist. They doubt, or deny outright, that there can be any reason to believe any scientific theory; and a fortiori they doubt or deny, for example, that there has been any accumulation of knowledge in recent centuries. The book is composed of two parts and Part One explains how these writers succeeded in making irrationalism about science acceptable to readers. Part Two explores the intellectual influence that led these writers to embrace irrationalism about science.
Scientific Irrationalism
Little known outside his native Australia, David Stove was one of the most illuminating and brilliant philosophical essayists of his era. A fearless attacker of intellectual and cultural orthodoxies, Stove left powerful critiques of scientific irrationalism, Darwinian theories of human behavior, and philosophical idealism. Since its inception in the 1940s, the field of science studies, originally intended to bridge the gap between science and the humanities, has been the center of controversy and debate. The most notable figures in this debate are Thomas Kuhn and Karl Popper. In Scientific Irrationalism, now available in paperback, David Stove demonstrates how extravagant has been the verbia...
The Rationality of Induction
Everyone knows that they are sometimes justified in making inductive inferences. The philosophical `problem of justifying' induction is therefore entirely imaginary. This book analyses the various literary devices which have enabled philosophers to conjure this pseudo-problem into existence.
What's Wrong with Benevolence
Is benevolence a virtue? In many cases it appears to be so. But when it comes to the ''enlarged benevolence'' of the Enlightenment, David Stove argues that the answer is clearly no. In this insightful, provocative essay, Stove builds a case for the claim that when benevolence is universal, disinterested and external, it regularly leads to the forced redistribution of wealth, which in turn leads to decreased economic incentives, lower rates of productivity, and increased poverty.As Stove points out, there is an air of paradox in saying that benevolence may be a cause of poverty. But there shouldn't be. Good intentions alone are never sufficient to guarantee the success of one's endeavors. Uto...
