Some context for some things Stove says in his essay: He'd just retired because he'd had enough of the craziness at Sydney Uni as Marxist/feminist/post-modernis

Some context for some things Stove says in his essay: He'd just retired because he'd had enough of the craziness at Sydney Uni as Marxist/feminist/post-modernists tried to take over the arts/philosophy departments, which literally split the philosophy department into 2 departments for some years. See James Franklin's The Sydney Philosophy Disturbances[0] and Stove's funny/depressing A Farewell to Arts: Marxism, Semiotics and Feminism (1986) [1] featuring some examples of the kind of prose the new style of philosopher was producing. It starts with the memorable paragraph "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." He also wrote a book, Popper and After: Four Modern Irrationalists[2], (i.e. Popper, Kuhn, Lakatos, Feyerabend) reprinted as Anything Goes: Origins of the Cult of Scientific Irrationalism, about what he saw as perhaps a similar 20th C crazy free-for-all trend in philosophy of science. [0] http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/sydq.html http://web.maths.unsw.edu.au/~jim/sydq.html [1] http://gerryonolan.com/public_html/stove/arts.html http://gerryonolan.com/public_html/stove/arts.html [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper_and_After https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Popper_and_After