“The Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney is a disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building 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. …. The sum of Marxism, semiotics and feminism is 0 + 0 + 0 = 0”
PATRICK KEENEY enjoys a witty tossing and goring of a contemporary sacred cow
“For ye have the poor always with you. – Matthew 26:11”
In this posthumously published essay, the late Australian philosopher David Charles Stove (1927 – 1994) provides a brilliant if disquieting analysis of benevolence as both a seductive and destructive force in the modern world.
Stove was an academic philosopher who wrote for both the popular press and the learned journals. He was a brutally honest writer, dismissive of the intellectual fashions of the day. He had no time for political correctness, and could be withering in his assessment of certain voguish trends in the academy. He was also fearless. Here, for example, are his thoughts about the university that employed him:
“The Faculty of Arts at the University of Sydney is a disaster-area, and not of the merely passive kind, like a bombed building 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. …. The sum of Marxism, semiotics and feminism is 0 + 0 + 0 = 0” (page x).
Stove’s expertise was the philosophy of science, and his technical work centered on the problem of induction. David Hume was his hero, and Stove’s scholarly writing follows in the robust tradition of British empiricism. He was contemptuous of relativism, post- modernism and indeed any approach to science which sought to refute the realist notions that there is a knowable universe about which we can make true statements. For Stove, it is a plain and irrefutable fact that science has discovered a great deal about our world, and that we know more about our world now than we did 100 years ago, let alone 500 years ago. In Stove’s estimation, anyone who would dispute such claims is either intellectually impaired, dishonest, or engaged in one or another form of irrationalism.
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