A Wisdom Archive on Handel

Stove's starting point in this area was the Humean argument for inductive scepticism. Stove was a great admirer of David Hume but thought that this argument (which Hume appeared not to accept later on in life) was not only fallacious but harmful in its effects, and that in fact it was one of the causes (though not the only one) of the 'modern nervousness'. Stove traced a direct line from Hume to Popper, to ...

Read more here: » David Stove: Encyclopedia II - David Stove - Philosophy of Science Induction and Probability

The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies (1991) proved to be even more outrageous than Popper and After, not least for the fact that its analyses were often as sociological and satirical as philosophical. Among the topics that Stove attacked were Nelson Goodman's 'worldmaking', external world skepticism and solipsism, Popper again, and Robert Nozick's idea that explanation should replace argument (Stove argued that the distinction was vacuous, and a ...

Read more here: » David Stove: Encyclopedia II - David Stove - The Plato Cult

After his youthful flirtations with Marxism Stove abandoned the left. His views were summed-up well in his paper 'Why You Should be A Conservative' (reprinted in part as 'The Columbus Argument'). His main argument in this paper was that just as there are many more ways to make a television set worse than those which will make it better, so there are many more ways to make society worse than to make it better. If we think otherwise that is only because we have been fed 'a one-sided diet of examples', such as Christopher Columbus, Copernicus a ...

Read more here: » David Stove: Encyclopedia II - David Stove - Political Philosophy

Many fictional Christmas stories capture the spirit of Christmas in a modern-day fairy tale, often with heart-touching stories of a Christmas miracle. Several have become part of the Christmas tradition in their countries of origin. Among the most popular are Tchaikovsky's ballet The Nutcracker and Charles Dickens's novel A Christmas Carol. The Nutcracker tells of a nutcracker that comes to life in a young German girl's dream. Charles Dickens' A Christmas Carol is the tale of curmudgeonly miser Ebenezer Scr ...

Read more here: » Christmas: Encyclopedia II - Christmas - Christmas in the arts and media

Stove became best known to the wider intellectual community for his attacks on Karl Popper and his falsificationist philosophy of science, as well as the influential philosophies of Thomas Kuhn and Paul Feyerabend. His book Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists (1982) has been reprinted in two new editions in recent years. In it Stove claimed to expose the methods by which Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos and Feyeraband managed to make their philosophies seem respectable. One such method was, Stove claimed, the "neutralizing of suc ...

Read more here: » David Stove: Encyclopedia II - David Stove - Polemics against Popper and other 'irrationalists'

In his final years Stove turned his critical glare on Darwinism. This surprised and dismayed many of his supporters who were Darwinists and thought Stove was as well, judging from the way he sometimes spoke. However, Stove's attack on Darwinism was not as radical as it appeared - he accepted evolution was true of all living things, and said he had no objection to natural selection being true of more primitive organisms. What he wanted to attack was the distorted view of human beings put about by some Ultra-Darwinists. For example, W. D. Hami ...

Read more here: » David Stove: Encyclopedia II - David Stove - Darwinism

Stove is best known for his scathing attacks of a variety of topics, especially Popperian falsificationism, Marxism, feminism, and postmodernism. He is regarded by some as one of the greatest defenders of common sense, and one of the wittiest of philosophers. Others, however, regard Stove as a reactionary and a controversialist. From early in his career he was regarded as a serious, top-flight philosopher of science and he is still considered by many to have defeated inductive skepticism. He was also someone who always wrote articles ...

Read more here: » David Stove: Encyclopedia II - David Stove - Reputation

Stove held many views contrary to what the majority of society finds acceptable. What made Stove an interesting thinker was the arguments he gave for these controversial views. Stove's colleague (and literary executor) James Franklin puts it like this: anyone can be against lots of things; the Stove trick was to be against things for reasons one would not have thought of oneself. Two particularly inflamatory examples are "The Intellectual Capacity of Women" and "Racial and Other Antagonisms" (both appear in ...

Read more here: » David Stove: Encyclopedia II - David Stove - Stove's contrariness

David Stove was born on 15 September 1927, at Moree, New South Wales, a small Australian country town. He later lived in Newcastle, New South Wales before studying philosophy at the University of Sydney in the mid-to-late 1940's. Here, like many Australian philosophers of his generation, he came under the influence of Professor John Anderson (philosopher). He absorbed Anderson's realism but was later to shake off oth ...

Read more here: » David Stove: Encyclopedia II - David Stove - Life

The name Solomon (Shlomo) means "peaceful," or "complete", from the Hebrew Shelomoh (Arabic Sulaiman). The name given by God to Solomon in the Bible is Jedidiah, meaning "loved by God", (2 Samuel 12:25), and some scholars have conjectured that Solomon is a "king name" taken either when he assumed the throne or upon his death. Solomon's case is one of the few in the Bible where the name given by God does not stay with the character. Solomon's birth is considered a grace from God, after the death o ...

Read more here: » King Solomon: Encyclopedia II - King Solomon - The name Solomon

Christmas is typically the largest annual stimulus for the economies of celebrating nations. Sales increase dramatically in almost all retail areas and shops introduce new products as people purchase gifts, decorations, and supplies. In the US, the Christmas shopping season now begins on Black Friday, the day after Thanksgiving. More businesses and stores close on Christmas Day than any other day of the year in most countries - in most communities, virtually nothing is open or operating. In the United Kingdom, the Christmas Day (Trading) Act ...

Read more here: » Christmas: Encyclopedia II - Christmas - Economics of Christmas