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you take it back," was never more apposite than in the case of these
writers.
Stove also undoubtedly identified the real reason why Kuhn so
offended the Popperians, despite the fact that his doctrine essentially
amounted to the same thing as Popper's: the fact that Kuhn "bids fair,
by the immense influence of his writing on 'the rabble without doors,'
to make irrationalism the
majority
opinion...the cruelest fate which
can overtake
enfant-terribles
is to awake and find that their avowed
opinions have swept the suburbs."
Another brand of philosophical irrationalist whom Stove routed
was the sort of philosopher, whether idealist, postmodernist, Kuhnian
or cultural relativist, who holds that it is impossible for us to gain any
real knowledge of the world, or (like some Marxists and some acade–
mic feminists) that our knowledge is "inescapably limited." Some of
Stove's essays on this topic were collected in
The Plato Cult and Other
Philosophical Follies,
and Kimball reprints one of them, "Idealism: A
Victorian Horror-Story (Part II)." This piece is one of the greatest
philosophical
tours de force
ever written, in which Stove shows, with
consummate panache, how the central arguments for these various
"cognophobe" positions all turn out to contain nothing but empty
tautologies .
Stove was also a trenchant critic of the misuse of Darwinism, and the
third section of Kimball's collection contains four essays from Stove's
book
Darwinian Fairytales.
In attacking Darwinism, Stove lost a few
admirers who had been impressed with his defenses of science. And one
would be entitled to be suspicious of such a book, given that most arm–
chair attacks on Darwinism are written by ignorant cranks, usually of
one or another religious stripe. But Stove has a considerable knowledge
of Darwinism (as it happens he regards Darwin as one of the greatest of
all thinkers) and a brain considerably sharper than most writers on the
topic, and there is nothing here that an intelligent Darwinian should dis–
agree with, although if he is a dogmatic sociobiologist he probably will.
Stove does not doubt that natural selection is overwhelmingly likely to
be the true explanation of our origins, but he does reveal the sloppiness
in certain Darwinian views, especially those that attempt to explain all
human behavior in terms of Darwinian principles and those that use
simple Malthusian principles to predict population growth . (The latter
sort of view resulted in environmental doomsayers like Paul Ehrlich
claiming that it was a near-mathematical certainty that we would all die
of starvation in the 1970s. I may be mistaken, but I seem to recall that
that didn't happen.)
