David Stove

In fewer than two hundred pages, David Stove leaves the well-established and widely regarded edifice of the academic philosophy of science in smouldering ruins. This book provides a modern history of scientific reasoning, from David Hume's inductive scepticism to Karl Popper's outright denial of induction, to the increasingly irrational and absurd scientific views that followed. When Popper untethered science from...

Is benevolence a virtue? In many cases, it appears to be so. But when it comes to the enlarged benevolence of the Enlightenment, David Stove argues that the answer is clearly no. In this insightful, provocative essay, Stove builds a case for the claim that when benevolence is universal, disinterested, and external, it regularly leads to the forced redistribution of...

Whatever your opinion of Intelligent Design, you'll find Stove's criticism of what he calls 'Darwinism' difficult to stop reading. Stove's blistering attack on Richard Dawkins' 'selfish genes' and 'memes' is unparalleled and unrelenting. A discussion of spiders who mimic bird droppings is alone worth the price of the book. Darwinian Fairytales should be read and pondered by anyone interested in...