Against the Idols of the Age [Paperback]

David Stove (Author), Roger Kimball (Editor, Introduction)

Book Description

ISBN-10: 0765809109 | ISBN-13: 978-0765809100 | Publication Date: July 11, 2001

"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, epitomied 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, Popper, Kuhn, Lalatos, and Feyerabend."--The Review of Metaphysics

"A self-proclaimed neo-positivist-and a brilliant, truculent, cantankerous essayist-Stove attacks everything from contemporary philosophy of science and evolutionary theory to religious belief and intellectual equality of women."-The Weekly Standard

"What separates Stove fromyour average angry-eyed reactionaryis the startling brilliant way that he argues, combiningplain horse sense with the most nimble and skillful philosophical reasoning this side of Hume, along with a breathtaking wit." -Partisan Review

"An early, fearless, sometimes reckless combatant in the science and culture warsStove fought wittily and two-fistedly on the side of empirical realism."-Choice

Little known outside his native Australia, David Stove was one of the most illuminating and brilliant philosophical essayists of the postwar era. A fearless attacker of intellectual and cultural orthodoxies, Stove left powerful critiques of scientific irrationalism, Darwinian theories of human behavior, and philosophical idealism. Stove's writing is both rigorous and immensely readable. It is, in the words of Roger Kimball, "an invigorating blend of analytic lucidity, mordant humor, and an amount of common sense too great to be called 'common.'"

Whether the subject is race, feminism, the Enlightenment, or the demand for "non-coercive philosophy," Stove is on the mark with a battery of impressive arguments expressed in sharp, uncompromising prose. Against the Idols of the Age concludes with a generous sampling of his blistering attacks on Darwinism.

David Stove (1927-1994) taught philosophy at the University of New South Wales and, until his retirement in 1988, at the University of Sydney. He was the author of numerous essays, articles, and several books including Anything Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism, The Plato Cult and Other Intellectual Follies, and two posthumously published volumes, Darwinian Fairytales and Cricket versus Republicanism.

Roger Kimball is managing editor of the New Criterion and an art critic for the London Spectator. He is author of Tenured Radicals (newly revised and expanded) The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America, and, most recently, Experiments Against Reality: The Fate of Culture in the Postmodern Age.

Editorial Reviews

From the Back Cover

David Stove is thoughtful, trenchant, sharp, and wonderfully disrespectful of the established pieties of our time. He's also a treat to read. --Harvey C. Mansfield, professor of government, Harvard University

A philosopher whose wit and satirical genius was directed against the follies and absurdities to be found in philosophers--and others. --David Armstrong, emeritus professor of philosophy, University of Sydney

In a culture of iconoclastic posturing, David Stove is the true iconoclast. He is outrageously wrong about some things, but putting up with that is a price worth paying for his formidable, and frequently funny, contributions to--in the words of the great Dr. Johnson--clearing the mind of cant. --Richard John Neuhaus, editor in chief, First Things

David Stove took no intellectual prisoners. A deadly serious (and hilariously funny) enemy of intellectual cant and the higher pretensions, he wrote to kill. In the process he demonstrated what had come to seem questionable: that professional philosophers can still make a vital contribution to public debate. Many thanks to Roger Kimball for making these brilliant essays available in America. --Owen Harries, editor, The National Interest

David Stove was a man before his time, providing answers to a number of mounting problems in politics and academic life whose eventual, disastrous dimensions were foreseen by very few others when he wrote. He long had a small circle of admirers who appreciated not only his intellectual brilliance and the polish of his unadorned prose, but how funny he invariably was. Since his death in 1994, the circle of insiders has widened to include many people who had not read him when he was alive but who, on discovering him, have asked almost incredulously: why didn't I know of his work before? This book shows just how much, until now, they have all missed. --Keith Windschuttle, author of The Killing of History

As Francis Bacon alerted us to the misleading habits of mind--idols of Tribe, Cave, Marketplace and Theater--that deprive us of knowledge, David Stove exposes the irrationalities of fashionable ideologies that deliver us over to relativism, skepticism and cynicism. Roger Kimball offers us, with an introductory overview, an astute collection of essays by Stove, brilliantly exposing current ideologies under the Baconian title Against the Idols of the Age. Stove's carefully reasoned arguments expose the intellectual fraudulence and cant that have blinded us to the attainability of knowledge. He makes the case not only that it is intellectually respectable to seek the truth, but that it is contemptible to be bullied by bad arguments and paradigms of the politically and intellectually "correct" into abandoning the search. Stove is an independent and honest philosopher who, like Voltaire and Nietzsche, has the wit to make us laugh as we learn. --John Silber, chancellor Boston University --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

About the Author

Roger Kimball is co-editor and publisher of The New Criterion and president and publisher of Encounter Books. He is also an art critic for the London Spectator and National Review. He is author of numerous titles including The Rape of the Masters: How Political Correctness Sabotages Art and Art's Prospect: The Challenge of Tradition in an Age of Celebrity.

David Stove (1927-1994) taught philosophy at the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney. He was a critic of sociobiology, Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism. He is the author of numerous books, including The Rationality of Induction; What’s Wrong with Benevolence: Happiness, Private Property, and the Limits of Enlightenment; and Against the Idols of the Age.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 347 pages
• Publisher: Transaction Publishers (July 11, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0765809109
• ISBN-13: 978-0765809100
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.3 x 1.1 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,346,427 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

52 of 61 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Iconoclastic essays by masterful polemicist, January 23, 2001

By 

Greg Nyquist (Eureka, California USA) - See all my reviews
(VINE VOICE)    (REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Against the Idols of the Age (Hardcover)

This is not a book for moralizers, ideologues, fanatics, dogmatists, right thinkers, or anyone who cannot tolerate having some pet idea or another ripped to rhetorical shreds. David Stove must have been one of the most splenetic philosophical critics ever to put pen to paper. There are very few ideas, thinkers, ideologues that Stove approves of. He is, to use a phrase of the great critic William Hazlitt, a "great hater." Whether its Karl Popper, Plato, feminism, Darwinism, religion, idealism, Thomas Kuhn, Victorianism, Schopenhauer, academic, racial egalitarianism---they are all so much grist to the Stovean critical mill. Stove relishes attacking popular positions. Are women as intelligent men? No, declares Stove; nobody believes that, he insists, despite all the liberal fustian to the contrary. Is racism a valid concept? No, Stove argues, it is a mere neologism that nobody accepts in everyday life. Stove's iconoclasm might lead some to dismiss him as a mere crank. Certainly there is nothing easier than to disagree with him (his positions do tend towards unpalatable extremes). But because of Stove's incendiary wit, his clear, forceful, ingenious (though sometimes, admittedly, sophistical) argumentation, and his pungent, graceful, perspicuous style, he cannot be so casually dismissed. Stove is a master at finding compelling reasons to adopt outrageous opinions. Against "The Idols of the Age" is a contrarian classic. It belongs on the shelf of every person who is opposed, on principle, to all the appalling bilge that passes for common wisdom among today's "intellectuals." And even, as is more than probable, Stove attacks some idea or individual that you admire, what of it? We all of us need to be shaken out of our dogmatic slumbers now and again. I can think of no more invigorating way to be awaken than by reading Stove's brilliantly inflammatory essays. Highly recommended.

24 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Essays by the 20th Century Montaigne, November 24, 1999

By 

Michael Stephens (Sydney, Australia) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Against the Idols of the Age (Hardcover)

David Stove is the only essayist I have read whom I enjoy as much as I do Montaigne. You may think some of his views crazy, but they are always beautifully expressed, often funny, and overall they are couched in terms of such reasonableness as to make you wish, when you get to the end of this volume, that he had written 100 times as many.

23 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Aggressive intellectual humour at its best, October 31, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Against the Idols of the Age (Hardcover)

"Women are intellectually inferior to men"; "Discrimination on the basis of race is often justified"; "Darwinian evolutionary theory is not well-supported by evidence." Anyone can think up such theories, but only Stove can suport them with serious argument, different from what you would have thought of yourself.