Title
The Trouble with Principle / Stanley Fish.
ISBN
9780674272644
Published
Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press, [2001]
Copyright
©2001
Language
English
Language Note
In English.
Description
1 online resource (336 p.)
Other Standard Identifiers
10.4159/9780674272644 doi
Dewey Decimal Classification
323/.01
Summary
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.
Access Note
Access limited to authorized users.
System Details Note
Mode of access: Internet via World Wide Web.
Digital File Characteristics
text file PDF
Source of Description
Description based on online resource; title from PDF title page (publisher's Web site, viewed 01. Dez 2022)
Frontmatter
CONTENTS
Prologue: Taking Sides
I Politics All the Way Down
1 At the Federalist Society
2 Sauce for the Goose
3 Of an Age and Not for All Time
4 Boutique Multiculturalism
II Fish on the First
5 The Rhetoric of Regret
6 Fraught with Death
7 The Dance of Theory
III Reasons for the Devout
8 Vicki Frost Objects
9 Mission Impossible
10 A Wolf in Reason's Clothing
11 Playing Not to Win
12 Why We Can't All Just Get Along
13 Faith before Reason
IV Credo
14 Beliefs about Belief
15 Putting Theory in Its Place
16 Truth and Toilets
Epilogue: How the Right Hijacked the Magic Words
Notes
Acknowledgments
Index
