BOOKS
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Outside of philosophy, Stove fearlessly attacked the received wisdom
of modern liberals on a wide variety of topics, including feminism,
racism, and the political aims of the Enlightenment, and the second sec–
tion of Kimball's collection contains some of his most audacious
assaults on positions which the modern left-leaning intellectual holds
dear. (Further essays of this type can be found in Stove's collection
Cricket versus Republicanism.)
Plenty of us will disagree with at least some of the opinions Stove
argues for in these essays; indeed some of these opinions would get
Stove lynched in the average humanities department. In fact, he was
almost lynched at his own university for one essay called "A Farewell to
Arts: Marxism, Semiotics and Feminism," in which he ridiculed the
work of some of his postmodernist and feminist colleagues, and
described the arts faculty at the venerable old University of Sydney as "a
disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed build–
ing, or an area that has been flooded. It is the active kind, like a badly
leaking nuclear reactor, or an outbreak of foot-and-mouth disease in
cattle." And that was just the opening paragraph!
But what makes these essays so compelling-what separates Stove
from, for instance, your average angry-eyed reactionary propping up the
bar at a military reunion dinner-is the startlingly brilliant way that he
argues, combining, as he does, plain horse sense with the most nimble
and skillful philosophical reasoning this side of Hume, along with a
breathtaking wit. The result is unlike anything ever seen before. Stove
has the lightest of touches, and an unerring sense for where to twist the
knife, but he takes his subject matter seriously, and he never adopts a
position for show, unlike some of his targets.
I'm very glad that Kimball succeeded in finding a press that would
publish this book, for it is an ideal introduction to the work of an
undiscovered master.
(If
only someone could do the same for Stove's
hero, the late Donald Cary Williams of Harvard, the other great under–
appreciated genius of twentieth-century philosophy.) Stove is one of
those writers who is either loved or hated, although in this respect he
is of course hardly a rarity: plenty of gifted and entertaining writers fall
into that category. What it is that makes him utterly unique amongst
such a group is that he possesses an absolutely first-class brain, and–
almost unheard of amongst philosophers-an ability to rigorously
defend common sense without recourse to arguments that are almost
as dubious as the positions they are supposed to overcome.
Scott Campbell
