philosophy
Max Charlesworth
David Stove
Anything Goes: origins of the cult
of scientific irrationalism
Macleay Press $24.95pb, 218pp
1 876492 01 5
THE SYDNEY PHILOSOPHER David Stove died in 1994 after a feisty
career as a philosopher of science and as a distinguished
essayist of a right liberal persuasion. (His essays are collected
in two publications, The Plato Cult, 1991 and Cricket versus
Republicanism, 1995.) Stove saw himself as a kind of
philosophical George Orwell unmasking fashionable nonsense in
Marxism, feminism, postmodernism and so on, and he carried on a
long vendetta against the great philosopher of science, Karl
Popper.
Since his death Stove has acquired a considerable reputation
overseas and the present book is a reissue (with useful addenda
by Keith Windschuttle and James Franklin) of an earlier study of
1982. The irrationalists he has in his sights are all
philosophers of science from the 1970s -- Popper, Thomas Kuhn,
Imre Lakatos and Paul Feyerabend -- but the book is mainly devoted
to Stove's favourite enemy, Karl Popper. Kuhn and Feyerabend are
mainly bit players and Popper is seen as the villain of the piece
and poisoner of the wells. This emphasis is a pity since Kuhn and
Feyerabend are more immediately attractive thinkers and writers,
despite what Stove calls their 'enfant terribilism'. Again,
Stove's discussion of Popper is excessively convoluted and one
wonders what audience he wanted to address and warn. (I must say
that I found the books of the contemporary English-American
philosopher, Susan Haack -- Evidence and Inquiry and the recent
Manifesto of a Passionate Moderate -- who is concerned with latter
day irrationalists like Richard Rorty, much more accessible.
Rorty plays much the same punching-bag role for Haack as Popper
does for Stove.)
Some of the editorial blurbs on the dust jacket suggest that this
is a 'fun book' ('wickedly funny', 'scarifying wit', 'like
watching Fred Astaire dance' etc) but while there are some nice
asides à la Hume, it is not really concerned with witty polemic
and its preoccupation (almost obsession) with Popper often makes
it a rather dull, if worthy, read. I suspect that for most
middleİaged readers the philosophical debates of the 1980s are
back in the mists of antiquity and it would have livened the
discussion up if Stove had written an addendum on contemporary
'irrationalists', Foucault, Derrida, Latour, Sandra Harding,
Rorty et al.