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Against the Idols of the Age (Paperback)

~ David Stove (Author), (Editor, Introduction)
3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
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Editorial Reviews

Product Description

The book opens with some of Stove's most important attacks on irrationalism in the philosophy of science. He exposes the roots of this fashionable attitude, tracing it through writers like Paul Feyerabend and Thomas Kuhn to Karl Popper. Stove was a born controversialist, so it is not surprising that when he turned his attention to contemporary affairs he said things that are politically incorrect. The topical essays that make up the second part of the book show Stove at his most withering and combative. 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.


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.

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Product Details

  • Paperback: 347 pages
  • Publisher: Transaction Publishers (July 11, 2001)
  • Language: English
  • ISBN-10: 0765809109
  • ISBN-13: 978-0765809100
  • Product Dimensions: 9 x 6 x 1.1 inches
  • Shipping Weight: 1.2 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
  • Average Customer Review: 3.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
  • Amazon.com Sales Rank: #971,086 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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More About the Authors

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Roger Kimball
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Customer Reviews

12 Reviews
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Average Customer Review
3.9 out of 5 stars (12 customer reviews)
 
 
 
 
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43 of 49 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
(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.
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18 of 22 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.
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18 of 22 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.
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Most Recent Customer Reviews

5.0 out of 5 stars A Stove of Inspiration
As it turned out, reading Against the Idols of the Age, an anthology of Stove's work, was a good decision. Read more
Published 17 months ago by Gary Wolf

4.0 out of 5 stars The Stove Cult and other Philosophical Frivolities
In the first place, David Stove was a crank, a witty crank but a crank nonetheless. After reading these reviews, it appears that most of the people who like his books are cranks... Read more
Published on November 12, 2007 by Steven M. Duncan

2.0 out of 5 stars thinking as a game
This book isn't what it seems. Rather than making a case for anyone or any particular idea, what the book is really unintentionally about is showing technic in laying out... Read more
Published on May 15, 2007 by Mark bennett

5.0 out of 5 stars A representative collection from an original thinker
This book is a collection of 12 essays, all of which have appeared before in other books by the same author. Read more
Published on August 19, 2006 by MrOzik

1.0 out of 5 stars The less of this book you read, the better off you are
The simple reason Stove's ideas are often called 'unorthodox' or 'controversial' is obvious: Because most of them are wrong. Read more
Published on October 22, 2002 by Bradd E. Libby

4.0 out of 5 stars A testament to old ideas
Stove's book is rather hard to rate. On one hand it allows one to see old ideology that is likely repugnant to anyone who is not chained to some Newtonian universe - trapped much... Read more
Published on January 4, 2002 by Yuri Kuzyk

1.0 out of 5 stars Not so much common sense as common sophistry
During the fifties and sixties the United States government looked around the world for intellectuals who would support their cause in the cold war. Read more
Published on November 27, 2001 by pnotley@hotmail.com

5.0 out of 5 stars Banned book of the future...
This book is like a necessary slap in the face. It's also like eating a wild strawberry. There's something real and rare in it.

Still, buy it before it's banned. Read more

Published on March 21, 2001

5.0 out of 5 stars Acidic brilliance
A collection of philosophic essays which combine trenchant wit, intellectual brilliance and absolute fearlessness. Read more
Published on October 11, 2000 by Susan Tridgell

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