Description
Book SynopsisLittle known outside his native Australia, David Stove was one of the most illuminating and brilliant philo-sophical essayists of the postwar era. A fearless at-tacker of intellectual and cultural orthodoxies, Stove left powerful critiques of scientific irrationalism, Dar-winian theories of human behavior, and philosophi-cal idealism. He was also an occasional essayist of considerable charm and polemical snap. Stove's writ-ing 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.' Against the Idols of the Age brings together a repre-sentative selection of Stove's writing and is an ideal introduction to his work.
The book opens with some of Stove's most impor-tant attacks on irrationalism in the philosophy of sci-ence. He exposes the roots of this fashionable attitude, tracing it through writers like Paul Feyerabend andThomas
Table of Contents
1: The Cult of Irrationalism in Science; 1: Cole Porter and Karl Popper: The Jazz Age in the Philosophy of Science; 2: Sabotaging Logical Expressions; 3: Paralytic Epistemology, Or the Soundless Scream; 2: Idols Contemporary and Perennial; 4: D'Holbach's Dream: The Central Claim of the Enlightenment; 5: “Always apologize, always explain”: Robert Nozick’s War Wounds; 6: The Intellectual Capacity of Women; 7: Racial and Other Antagonisms; 8: Idealism: A Victorian Horror-story (Fart Two); 3: Darwinian Fairytales; 9: Darwinism's Dilemma; 10: Where Darwin First Went Wrong About Man; 11: Genetic Calvinism, or Demons and Dawkins; 12: He Ain't Heavy, He's my Brother or, Altruism and Shared Genes
