I know that I may well cop a lot of flack disclosing that I’m a fan of David Stove. One colleague called Stove the worst curmudgeon he’d ever come across, a writer that had the ability to rub many constituencies up the wrong way. Be that as it may, I find Stove a great writer and a worthwhile voice against the prevailing milieu in which he wrote – I like a “damn the torpedoes” attitude from time to time, Dennett being the best current practitioner. The reason I mention Stove is that I had the good fortune to meet Jim Franklin, Stove’s literary executor. I learned from Jim that a new and the last posthumous collection of Stove’s has just been published, edited by Andrew Irvine at UBC. Here is the Stove page maintained by Jim Franklin and an article by Roger Kimball (who has also written the forward to this latest work). For what it’s worth here is Stove’s Wikipedia entry. A good link is to Scott Campbell’s bio-sketch of Stove. For the more technically minded here is a reference to Stove’s The Problem of Induction.
Update: I now have a copy of the book courtesy of the editor Andrew Irvine. The title essay (the only essay) comprises some 100 pages. Another 100 or so pages is devoted to Stove’s bibliography. I see that Roger Scruton is featured on the dust-jacket blurb and that Andrew (rightly) takes on Hayek in his introduction. Kimball presents a very good portrait of Stove.
manwithoutqualities 