David Stove

David Charles Stove (15 September 1927 – 2 June 1994) was an Australian philosopher of science.

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• A philosopher may try to prove the truth of something he believed before he was a philosopher, but even if he succeeds, his belief never regains the untroubled character, and the settled place in his mind, which it had at first.
  • The Rationality of Induction, Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. Page 99, first paragraph.

• If a lack of empirical foundations is a defect of the theory of logical probability, it is also a defect of deductive logic.
  • The Rationality of Induction, Oxford: Clarendon, 1986. Page 176, last paragraph.

• [Popper's skepticism about scientific truth in The Logic of Scientific Discovery is] that kind of reaction, of which the epitome is given in Aesop's fable of the fox and the grapes. The parallel would be complete if the fox, having become convinced that neither he nor anyone else could ever succeed in tasting grapes, should nevertheless write many long books on the progress of viticulture.
  • Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists, Oxford: Pergamon, 1982. Page 52.

• The proprietor of a pornographic book shop may be dimly conscious of a debt to the author of Areopagitica, but Milton is the last person he wants to see in his shop.
  • Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists, Oxford: Pergamon, 1982. Page 54.

• 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.
  • A farewell to Arts, Quadrant, May 1986
• I have actually seen a cow escape from the well-grazed paddock in which she had long been kept, and promptly put her head back through the wire fence and begin grazing inside her former prison.
• Darwinian Fairytales, 1995.