David Stove was a philosopher of the not-cut-to pattern kind. (Is that a kind? Just how many are there?) For example, he did not hesitate to kick the seemingly unassailable Charles Darwin in the shins for a train of errors that Stove had methodically uncovered. I met him during the period when I lived in Sydney, Australia where my then husband John Bacon taught logic while I used my time to do the research for my first book, A Good Look at Evil. 

That I got access to the library at the University of Sydney and had doors opened for me with a title (“Research Fellow” or something like that) was due entirely to Stove’s intervention. He smoothed the way for me, while giving me absolutely vital philosophical guidance about what to read.

I’d had no ambition to see kangaroos or in other ways explore the upside down world Down Under. My sojourn at Sydney was a wholly unsought byproduct of my marriage to an American philosopher who got hired there only after we’d decided to marry. But, largely thanks to Stove’s advice, the research for my book, and the readership it would draw, was very much enlarged. So much for my personal debts to him. 

What was the scene there? At that time, philosophy at Sydney University had split mitotically into two ideologically incompatible departments: Traditional and Modern Philosophy, which did analytic philosophy (devoted to empiricism as a method and materialism as the metaphysical view) and, in the other department – General Philosophy – marxism and feminism.

Trad and Mod, as they called it, was where my then husband was based, as was David Stove, David Armstrong, Michael Devitt, Bill Lycan (briefly, as American visitor) – all very sharp analytic philosophers. On weekdays, its members lunched at the Staff Club, where they diverted each other (and any like-minded academics who joined) with witty philosophical tales of the trends, the news and the fresh gossip of the profession – along with good-natured professional sparring with each other. Their rivalry with “the other department” was part of the dramatic backdrop framing the lunch-time conversations.

(The only talk I gave at Sydney University was to “the other department,” and it was titled “Getting Past Marx and Freud.” Hey, what the heck! I wasn’t an analytic philosopher but – about M & F – why pussyfoot around?)

After I left Sydney, Stove and I continued to correspond. It’s a ten-year correspondence – probably the thickest personal file folder that I have. Some portion of our letters back and forth went into the archive assembled by Roger Kimball. I had not looked back at our correspondence since. From what I now see, our letters are spontaneous in feeling, careful in expression and candid.

His life – which he had lived with an evenness of temper, incisive wit, worldly circumspection and impressive philosophical erudition – ended with a drama and high pitch of tragedy that seemed quite out of keeping with the well-tended years before. His beloved wife was in recuperation from a stroke and he was under surveillance for cancer, though deemed provisionally free of it. It seemed that the things of his orderly life were at sudden risk of capsizing. 

The details escape me now, but they affected his daily moods and stifled his powers of recovery. Besides, in Stove’s case, what could his ultra-Tory views be except the protective casing around an extremely sensitive soul? Perhaps also some contra-indicated medication contributed to his sense (in the words of Edgar Allan Poe) of “unmerciful disaster [that] followed fast and followed faster till his songs one burden bore – of never, never more.” 

So he decided to cut that part of his story short. Alarmed at what I was hearing of his ordeals, I telephoned him long distance from New York. He simply and efficiently bundled me off the phone! He did not choose to share with me what he planned to do next.

As a commonsensical nonbeliever, he deemed himself fully competent to decide on his own the matter of his end. I would not have agreed with him, had he discussed the matter with me. But he acted consistently, by his own lights.

When I heard the news, I prayed for him and also called a philosopher-theologian friend, whom I deemed a good pray-er, asking him to join in sending his good words Upstairs. Musing on the philosophical atheists, my friend started to note how quick they are to mock any who believe in a reality not made evident by the senses – but then he stopped himself – recalling someone reputed for his piety who had also ended his own life. These matters are not to be wrapped up in a formula, he concluded, and promised to add his prayers to mine.

I’m now reading one of Stove’s unpredictable, not-cut-to-pattern books, Darwinian Fairytales: Selfish Genes, Errors of Heredity, and Other Fables of Evolution. The Darwinian theory, he says, however well it may work in accounting for flies, pines and cod, is wholly unable to account for the conduct and motivation of human beings.

While dissenting from the materialist reverence for Darwin, Stove sailed serenely through the disapproval of his colleagues at Trad and Mod. As I read Darwinian Fairytales now, delighted to be in David Stove’s company again, I savor this welcome revisiting of his striking and original powers,

exercised unafraid.

Related Content: A Good Look at Evil | Getting Past Marx and Freud