One Man’s Rage Against Bad Thinking. Recently-noticed late Australian philosopher of science David Stove said we lost faith in science because of our revulsion at the cocky certainty of 19th century Victorian scientific triumphalism, and because we have never been able to metabolize the quantum mechanical impeachment of Newtonian physics. Rationalist Stove intended to heal the plague of scientific relativism that has ensued. He was particularly concerned with what he considered the deplorable inconsistencies of modern evolutionary science and what he called the “slander on our race” of assuming that natural selection explains anything about the human race.

According to Stove, theories of helplessness gain a

hearing because the “human race is mad.” But Stove

is no defender of an intellectual elite. He exhibits his

greatest antipathy toward the allegedly learned few.

In a volume called The Plato Cult (three pieces

from which are included among Roger Kimball’s

selections), Stove cites a host of philosophers, from

Plato to Foucault, to illustrate the “spectacle of

nightmare irrationality” that is characteristic of our

intellectual heritage. The “cult of Plato,” which was

an integral part of the Renaissance revival,

encapsulates the tendency to treat great minds with

religious reverence. What we need is a “nosology”

of intellectual error, a classification of the diseases

that have afflicted the human mind at least since

Plato.

Stove does not hope to uncover the single root of all

these diseases, which are too numerous and varied

even to list exhaustively. And he has no hope for the

ultimate victory of reason: Irrationality will always

win out, because there are simply too many ways to

go wrong.

The Weekly Standard