David Charles Stove

DAVID CHARLES STOVE (1927-1994), was an Australian philosopher of science, and essayist in the popular press. His work in philosophy of science included detailed criticisms of David Hume’s inductive skepticism, as well as the alleged irrationalism of his disciplinary contemporaries Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend. He also marshalled a positive response to the problem of induction in his 1986 work, The Rationality of Induction. Stove was also a staunch critic of sociobiology, going as far as describing the field as a new religion in which genes play the role of gods.

Stove is best known for scathing attacks on a variety of concepts, especially Popperian falsificationism, Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism. Stove remains controversial. Some regard him as one of the great and witty defenders of common sense, who managed to defeat inductive skepticism. However others are skeptical of his arguments for induction and his criticisms of the philosophies of contemporaries Karl Popper, Thomas Kuhn, Imre Lakatos, and Paul Feyerabend, while his extreme language has led others to regard Stove as a mere reactionary and a controversialist. Stove also wrote articles on a variety of topics for non-philosophical magazines. As he got older many of his articles and books became increasingly irreverent. Stove achieved increased prominence in North America in the early 2000’s when Roger Kimball published a collection of his essays and since his death in 1994 four collections of his writings have been published.