Stanley Fish on Philosophy, Politics and Law

Stanley Fish on Philosophy, Politics and Law PDF Author: Michael Robertson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107074746
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
This book explores Fish's unconventional positions on politics and law, explaining how they flow from his positions on three philosophical issues.

Stanley Fish on Philosophy, Politics and Law

Stanley Fish on Philosophy, Politics and Law PDF Author: Michael Robertson
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
ISBN: 1107074746
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 367

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Book Description
This book explores Fish's unconventional positions on politics and law, explaining how they flow from his positions on three philosophical issues.

Stanley Fish on Philosophy, Politics and Law

Stanley Fish on Philosophy, Politics and Law PDF Author: Michael Spencer Robertson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781316073858
Category : Law
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
This book explores Fish's unconventional positions on politics and law, explaining how they flow from his positions on three philosophical issues.

Stanley Fish on Philosophy, Politics and Law

Stanley Fish on Philosophy, Politics and Law PDF Author: Michael Spencer Robertson
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781316078594
Category : LAW
Languages : en
Pages : 368

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Book Description
This book explores Fish's unconventional positions on politics and law, explaining how they flow from his positions on three philosophical issues.

The Trouble with Principle

The Trouble with Principle PDF Author: Stanley Fish
Publisher: Harvard University Press
ISBN: 0674005341
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
Stanley Fish is an equal opportunity antagonist. A theorist who has taken on theorists, an academician who has riled the academy, a legal scholar and political pundit who has ruffled feathers left and right, Fish here turns with customary gusto to the trouble with principle. Specifically, Fish has a quarrel with neutral principles. The trouble? They operate by sacrificing everything people care about to their own purity. And they are deployed with equal highmindedness and equally absurd results by liberals and conservatives alike. In this bracing book, Fish argues that there is no realm of higher order impartiality--no neutral or fair territory on which to stake a claim--and that those who invoke one are always making a rhetorical and political gesture. In the end, it is history and context, the very substance against which a purportedly abstract principle defines itself, that determines a principle's content and power. In the course of making this argument, Fish takes up questions about academic freedom and hate speech, affirmative action and multiculturalism, the boundaries between church and state, and much more. Sparing no one, he shows how our notions of intellectual and religious liberty--cherished by those at both ends of the political spectrum--are artifacts of the very partisan politics they supposedly transcend. The Trouble with Principle offers a provocative challenge to the debates of our day that no intellectually honest citizen can afford to ignore.

There's No Such Thing As Free Speech

There's No Such Thing As Free Speech PDF Author: Stanley Fish
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198024193
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 345

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Book Description
In an era when much of what passes for debate is merely moral posturing--traditional family values versus the cultural elite, free speech versus censorship--or reflexive name-calling--the terms "liberal" and "politically correct," are used with as much dismissive scorn by the right as "reactionary" and "fascist" are by the left--Stanley Fish would seem an unlikely lightning rod for controversy. A renowned scholar of Milton, head of the English Department of Duke University, Fish has emerged as a brilliantly original critic of the culture at large, praised and pilloried as a vigorous debunker of the pieties of both the left and right. His mission is not to win the cultural wars that preoccupy the nation's attention, but rather to redefine the terms of battle. In There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, Fish takes aim at the ideological gridlock paralyzing academic and political exchange in the nineties. In his witty, accessible dissections of the swirling controversies over multiculturalism, affirmative action, canon revision, hate speech, and legal reform, he neatly eviscerates both the conservatives' claim to possession of timeless, transcendent values (the timeless transcendence of which they themselves have conveniently identified), and the intellectual left's icons of equality, tolerance, and non-discrimination. He argues that while conservative ideologues and liberal stalwarts might disagree vehemently on what is essential to a culture, or to a curriculum, both mistakenly believe that what is essential can be identified apart from the accidental circumstances (of time and history) to which the essential is ritually opposed. In the book's first section, which includes the five essays written for Fish's celebrated debates with Dinesh D'Souza (the author and former Reagan White House policy analyst), Fish turns his attention to the neoconservative backlash. In his introduction, Fish writes, "Terms that come to us wearing the label 'apolitical'--'common values', 'fairness', 'merit', 'color blind', 'free speech', 'reason'--are in fact the ideologically charged constructions of a decidedly political agenda. I make the point not in order to level an accusation, but to remove the sting of accusation from the world 'politics' and redefine it as a synonym for what everyone inevitably does." Fish maintains that the debate over political correctness is an artificial one, because it is simply not possible for any party or individual to occupy a position above or beyond politics. Regarding the controversy over the revision of the college curriculum, Fish argues that the point is not to try to insist that inclusion of ethnic and gender studies is not a political decision, but "to point out that any alternative curriculum--say a diet of exclusively Western or European texts--would be no less politically invested." In Part Two, Fish follows the implications of his arguments to a surprising rejection of the optimistic claims of the intellectual left that awareness of the historical roots of our beliefs and biases can allow us, as individuals or as a society, to escape or transcend them. Specifically, he turns to the movement for reform of legal studies, and insists that a dream of a legal culture in which no one's values are slighted or declared peripheral can no more be realized than the dream of a concept of fairness that answers to everyone's notions of equality and jsutice, or a yardstick of merit that is true to everyone's notions of worth and substance. Similarly, he argues that attempts to politicize the study of literature are ultimately misguided, because recharacterizations of literary works have absolutely no impact on the mainstream of political life. He concludes his critique of the academy with "The Unbearable Ugliness of Volvos," an extraordinary look at some of the more puzzing, if not out-and-out masochistic, characteristics of a life in academia. Penetrating, fearless, and brilliantly argued, There's No Such Thing as Free Speech captures the essential Fish. It is must reading for anyone who cares about the outcome of America's cultural wars.

Save the World on Your Own Time

Save the World on Your Own Time PDF Author: Stanley Fish
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0199892970
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 200

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Book Description
"Save the World on Your Own Time is invariably smart, stimulating, and provocative. It is filled with insights and crackles with verve. It is a joy to take in." - Texas Law Review

Think Again

Think Again PDF Author: Stanley Fish
Publisher: Princeton University Press
ISBN: 0691195919
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 448

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Book Description
From one of America's most important cultural critics comes this collection of the best of his provocative New York Times essays, pieces that have generated passionate discussion and debate.

Doing What Comes Naturally

Doing What Comes Naturally PDF Author: Stanley Fish
Publisher: Duke University Press
ISBN: 9780822309956
Category : Education
Languages : en
Pages : 628

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Book Description
"In literary theory, the philosophy of law, and the sociology of knowledge, no issue has been more central to current debate than the status of our interpretations. Do they rest on a ground of rationality or are they subjective impositions of a merely personal point of view? In Doing What Comes Naturally, Stanley Fish refuses the dilemma posed by this question and argues that while we can never separate our judgments from the contexts in which they are made, those judgments are nevertheless authoritative and even, in the only way that matters, objective. He thus rejects both the demand for an ahistorical foundation, and the conclusion that in the absence of such a foundation we reside in an indeterminate world. In a succession of provocative and wide-ranging chapters, Fish explores the implications of his position for our understanding of legal, literary, and psychoanalytic interpretation, the nature of professional and institutional culture, and the place of reason in a world that is rhetorical through and through."--Publisher description.

Winning Arguments

Winning Arguments PDF Author: Stanley Fish
Publisher: HarperCollins
ISBN: 0062226681
Category : Language Arts & Disciplines
Languages : en
Pages : 134

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Book Description
“Fish mines cultural touchstones from Milton to ‘Married with Children’ to explain how various types of arguments are structured and how that understanding can lead to victory” — New York Times Book Review A lively and accessible guide to understanding rhetoric by the world class English and Law professor and bestselling author of How to Write a Sentence. Filled with the wit and observational prowess that shaped Stanley Fish’s acclaimed bestseller How to Write a Sentence, Winning Arguments guides readers through the “greatest hits” of rhetoric. In this clever and engaging guide, Fish offers insight and outlines the crucial keys you need to win any debate, anywhere, anytime—drawn from landmark legal cases, politics, his own career, and even popular film and television. A celebration of clashing minds and viewpoints, Winning Arguments is sure to become a classic.

Stanley Fish, America's Enfant Terrible

Stanley Fish, America's Enfant Terrible PDF Author: Gary A. Olson
Publisher: SIU Press
ISBN: 0809334763
Category : Biography & Autobiography
Languages : en
Pages : 193

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Book Description
"A chronological narrative of the life and an intellectual chronicle and explication of the major works of legal scholar, literary critic, and public intellectual Stanley Fish, who is considered one of the century's most original and influential literary theorists"--