David Charles Stove (15 September 1927 – 2 June 1994) was an Australian philosopher whose writings often challenged prevailing academic orthodoxy. He was known for his critiques of postmodernism, feminism, and multiculturalism.

Philosophy

His work in philosophy of science included criticisms of David Hume's inductive scepticism. He offered a positive response to the problem of induction in his 1986 work, The Rationality of Induction. In Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists, Stove attacked the leading philosophers of science, Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend, on the grounds that their commitment to the thesis that all logic is deductive led to skepticism. In 1985 Stove held a competition to find the "worst argument in the world", and awarded the prize to himself for the argument "we can know things only under our forms of understanding/as they are related to us, etc, therefore we cannot know things as they are in themselves". He called this argument "The Gem" and argued that it appeared widely in various forms. His book The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies contains the influential essay "What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts?". According to philosopher Nicholas Shackel, this essay showed that "there are indefinitely many ways of cheating intellectually and for most there is no simple way to put one’s finger on how the cheat is effected." Stove was also a critic of sociobiology, describing it as a new religion in which genes play the role of gods.

Politics

Stove and David M. Armstrong both resisted what they saw as attempts by Marxists to infiltrate the Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney. In 1984–85 Stove protested publicly that the faculty was favouring women in appointments. In "A Farewell to Arts", Stove wrote that he abandoned Marxism when he discovered "what real intellectual work was". In his essay "Why You Should be A Conservative", Stove argued that actions can have unforeseen and unwelcome consequences; that just because something is wrong or evil, it does not follow that the world would be better off without it; and that a decline in respect for life and property had led to a decline in quality of life. In "Racial and Other Antagonisms" (1989) Stove asserted that racism is not a form of prejudice but common sense: "Almost everyone unites in declaring 'racism' false and detestable. Yet absolutely everyone knows it is true". In "The Intellectual Capacity of Women" (1990) he stated his belief that "the intellectual capacity of women is on the whole inferior to that of men".

Legacy

Since his death in 1994 four collections of his writings have been published. Two were edited by art critic Roger Kimball: Against the Idols of the Age and Darwinian Fairytales. Kimball also wrote the foreword to What's Wrong With Benevolence, in which he writes "The most thrilling intellectual discovery of my adult life came in 1996 when I chanced upon the work of the Australian philosopher David Stove".

Personal life

With his wife Jessie, he had two children, Judith and R. J. Stove. Stove enjoyed cricket, baroque music and gardening. Stove committed suicide after being diagnosed with esophageal cancer.

Works

Collaborations Selected publications