The Light of Reason

"It is unfortunate but true that rational thought -- what Hume called the 'calm sunshine of the mind' -- is historically rare, local, and ephemeral... Given a large aggregation of human beings, and a long time, you cannot reasonably expect rational thought to win." (the Australian philosopher David Stove, who died in 1994)

Stove ridiculed the work of some of his postmodernist and feminist colleagues, and described the arts faculty at the venerable old University of Sydney as "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"...