|
|
Books : The Trouble with PrincipleIn association with Amazon.comby: Stanley Fish  List Price: $16.95 Amazon.com's Price: $15.25 You Save: $1.70 (10%)Prices subject to change. Availability: Usually ships in 24 hours
This item ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping.
Binding: PaperbackDewey Decimal Number: 301 EAN: 9780674005341 ISBN: 0674005341 Label: Harvard University Press Manufacturer: Harvard University Press Number Of Items: 1 Number Of Pages: 336 Publication Date: March 02, 2001 Publisher: Harvard University Press Studio: Harvard University Press Sales Rank: 574469 Related Items:
Editorial Review: Product 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. Average Rating:
 Rating:  - A Masterpiece of Sharp Thought on Contemporary IssuesFish's book on principle, where he dismantles the fanciful notions of "neutral zones" and "non-position positions" of argumentation, is a truly engaging work, like most of his books have been. You can't quite function fully as an American intellectual unless you engage with his thinking at some level, even if it is to disagree. He's often misrepresented in certain circles as "just another academic nutjob," but nothing could be more foolishly dismissive. Think he's a right-winger? Think again -- he ... Read More Rating:  - Exit stage left from the enlightenmentFirst and most importantly, no one should presume to have refuted antifoundationalism without confronting the challenge Fish lays down in these pages. Since they are putatively on opposite sides of the academic and culture wars, it is striking how closely the position Stanley Fish takes in this book resembles that of Peter Kreeft in his "A Refutation of Moral Relativism: Interviews With an Absolutist": lurking behind enlightenment precepts such as open-mindedness, neutrality, impartiality, ... Read More Rating: - Go fishThe trouble with this text,of course, is that Fish's thought that all thought is culturally and subjectively driven, etc., is that his thought that this is so is also culturally, historically, socially and subjectively driven. This is taken into account, and I must say he defends it as well as he possibly can when this -seems- to happen to be so. It is very similar to the moral relativists, though, who take a moral stance that there is none. This is fascinating reading in circles. Rating: - If this book didn't make you think...what are you thinking?!It has been about three months since I've read this book and I am still calling it to mind on a regular basis. Like some reviewers below, I give this book a high rating while admitting that Fish's views are unpalatable, infuriating, and troubling, as often as not. Fish's central thesis here is that there are no such things as neutral principles - those completely objective, a priori dicta, formula, and abstract ideas to base our 'neutral' theories on. From my experience with this book (and I think ... Read More Rating:  - Posturing, pseudointellectual hooey.All Stanley Fish does is rephrase Machiavelli and Hasan I Sabah. "Nothing is true, all is permissible, and I will gladly lie to you if it advances my interests." He's a phony, his prose is repetitive and self-congratulatory, and his constant and shameless self-promotion is nauseating to behold. He is the glib and gladhanding public face of an utterly useless and morally repugnant philosophy, and he has as much as admitted--in this book as well as his other works-- that he'd be happy in a totalitarian society ... Read More Browse for similar items by category:
|
||