Introduction to David Stove

I am forever grateful to a friend for directing me to the writings of David Stove. The late David Stove (1927-1994) was an Australian philosopher who spent most of his academic career at the University of Sydney. He retired early at the age of 60, disgusted with the winds of political correctness wafting through the Australian universities.

Stove’s writing is trenchant, witty, ironic, and refreshingly not politically correct. No “ism” is too large for him to take on and he does so with remarkable clarity for a philosopher. Feminism, racism, idealism – all are subjected to Stove’s rigorous logic and if in the end unconvinced by his argument, one nonetheless has been forced to think.

His is the only philosophical writing that has made me laugh out loud on several occasions as I read through the selected essays that make up the book, Against the Idols of the Age, an anthology of selections of Stove’s writing assembled by Roger Kimball.

Here is but one example from Stove’s debunking of some teachings of Thomas Kuhn.

"According to Kuhn, in its heyday every discarded scientific theory possessed the full integrity of what we now call sound scientific truth. To illustrate this, he asks: what mistake was made, what rule broken, when and by whom, in arriving at, say the Ptolemaic system? For most people Stove points out, this is not a difficult question. For starters there was the mistake of believing that the sun goes around the earth once every day. But Kuhn, impatient with the idea that “successive theories grow ever closer to…the truth, professes to find it “difficult to understand” what it might mean to call that system, or any other out of date theory, a mistake. As Stove observes, “You have to be very learned indeed to find things as hard to understand as Kuhn does”

For any of you with a streak of contrarianism coursing through your veins, the difficulties Kimball experienced in finding a publisher for this book, should make you want to read it even more. Here is how Kimball describes his experience.

I approached more than a dozen presses, commercial and academic, and was summarily rejected by them all, sometimes politely, sometimes not. The responses were divided about equally between quivering pusillanimity and furious outrage. One editor acknowledged that Stove’s work was “really well-written and provocative,” but concluded that Stove “simply gores too many oxen on too many subjects….Almost every academic press these days has room for twenty-seven varieties of Queer Theory, eighteen contributions to Cultural Studies, Post-Colonial Studies and other reader-proof versions of neo-Marxism as well as fifty-two examples of “Feminist readings of….(fill in the blank as desired). But anything that challenges these orthodoxies is automatically excluded. Stove himself remarked “our freedom of the press, except for really precious things like pornography, has greatly diminished in the last hundred years, and especially in the last twenty”

I encourage you to read Against the Idols of the Age. If you are unable to do so, you can at least expect to see references to it in future postings on this site.