Bøger af 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 smoldering ruins.This book provides a modern history of scientific reasoning, from David Hume's inductive skepticism to Karl Popper's outright denial of induction, to the increasingly irrational and absurd scientific views that followed. When Popper untethered science from induction, Stove argues, he triggered a postmodernist nightmare of utter nonsense culminating in Paul Feyerabend's summation that "anything goes" when it comes to defining or describing science. With undeniable logic, a deft analysis of the linguistic slight-of-hand that make absurd arguments seem reasonable, and regular displays of wit, Stove gives the reader a front row seat to one of the greatest unforced errors in the history of modern thought. Stove's views are entirely consistent with the origins of scientific inference and logic, as well as modern advances in probability theory, and yet he remains largely unnoticed by most of the academic world. From Stove's insider-outsider perspective, the train wreck that is academically accepted philosophy of science and "science studies" is a fascinating and thoroughly entertaining subject of study.Scientific Irrationalism is the perfect place to begin any examination of what science is--and what it is not.

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 wealth, which in turn leads to decreased economic incentives, lower rates of productivity, and increased poverty. As Stove points out, there is an air of paradox in saying that benevolence may be a cause of poverty. But there shouldn't be. Good intentions alone are never sufficient to guarantee the success of one's endeavors. Utopian schemes to reorganize the world have regularly ended in failure. Easily the most important example of this phenomenon is twentieth-century communism. As Stove reminds us, the attractiveness of communism--the "emotional fuel" of communist revolutionaries for over a hundred years--has always been "exactly the same as the emotional fuel of every other utopianism: the passionate desire to alleviate or abolish misery." Yet communism was such a monumental failure that millions of people today are still suffering its consequences. In this most prescient of essays, Stove warns contemporary readers just how seductive universal political benevolence can be. He also shows how the failure to understand the connection between benevolence and communism has led to many of the greatest social miseries of our age.

This work opens with Stove's attacks on irrationalism in the philosophy of science, exposing the roots of this fashionable attitude. The second section contains topical essays on subjects such as feminism, race or the Enlightenment. The text concludes with blistering attacks on Darwinism.

Secession, State & Liberty examines history, political philosophy, ethics, and economic theory of secessionist movements in the United States, Canada, and Europe. It is based on a conference, sponsored by the Ludwig von Mises Institute, on the political economy of secession.

An investigation of the political impulse to secede, presenting essays by Donald Livingston, Murray N. Rothbard, Clyde Wilson and Bruce Benson, among others. They include analyses of secessionist movements in the United States, Canada and Europe.

This is a book on philosophy which subjects several theories to critical examination and asks how they relate to our commonsensical notions of reality. Among the celebrated philosophers whom the author tries to debunk are Plato, Hegel, Kant, Foucault, Popper, Nozick, Feyerabend and Goodman.

Argues that Darwin's theory of evolution is a ridiculous slander on human beings. This book is suitable for people who want to understand the issues behind the hotly debated scientific controversy.