David Stove - The Plato Cult

The Plato Cult

The Plato Cult and Other Philosophical Follies (1991) was even more controversial than Popper and After, not least for the fact that its analyses were often as sociological or satirical as they were 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 product of the desire to appear non-coercive).

Stove also harshly criticised philosophical idealism. Stove claimed that what George Berkeley did was to try to derive a non-tautological conclusion from tautological reasoning. He argued that in Berkeley's case the fallacy is not obvious and this is because one premise is ambiguous between one meaning which is tautological and one which is not (but which is logically equivalent to the conclusion). Stove concluded that it was hard to avoid the view that idealism is just a religious substitute.

About Immanuel Kant he had this to say:

"Kant's questions are so strange and arresting that no one who has once heard them ever forgets them. It is just the reverse with his answers to them: no one can ever remember what these are! And there is a simple reason for this: the questions never get answered at all. Once they have served as an excuse for the darkening of sufficient area of wood-pulp, they just get lost".

The book ends with Stove claiming to show (in "What Is Wrong With Our Thoughts?") just how easily abstract thought can go wrong, the seemingly endless ways in which it can, and how little we know about these ways. To this end he gave a list of forty propositions about the number 3, all of which he argued demonstrate thought going wrong, and yet we can only say of a few of these what particular "disease of thought" is occurring.

For example:

• Three lies between two and four only by a convention which mathematicians have adopted.

• There is an integer between two and four, but it is not three, and its true name and nature are not to be revealed.

• Three is an incomplete object, only now coming into existence.

• The tie which unites the number three to its properties (such as primeness) is inexplicable.

In the book Stove also coined the phrase Horror Victorianorum ("a horror of the Victorians") to satirise what he perceived as an irrational modernist distaste for Victorian culture. This concept has been taken up within design and art history in order to characterise unthinkingly visceral dislike of Victorian architecture, art and design.