Fish, Stanley. "Does Philosophy Matter?" Opiniator Blog. NEW YORK TIMES August 1, 2011.

Now it could be said (and some philosophers will say it) that the person who deliberates without self-conscious recourse to deep philosophical views is nevertheless relying on or resting in such views even though he is not aware of doing so. To say this is to assert that doing philosophy is an activity that underlies our thinking at every point, and to imply that if we want to think clearly about anything we should either become philosophers or sit at the feet of philosophers. But philosophy is not the name of, or the site of, thought generally; it is a special, insular form of thought and its propositions have weight and value only in the precincts of its game . Points are awarded in that game to the player who has the best argument going (“best” is a disciplinary judgment) for moral relativism or its opposite or some other position considered “major.” When it’s not the game of philosophy that is being played, but some other — energy policy, trade policy, debt reduction, military strategy, domestic life — grand philosophical theses like “there are no moral absolutes” or “yes there are” will at best be rhetorical flourishes; they will not be genuine currency or do any decisive work. Believing or disbelieving in moral absolutes is a philosophical position, not a recipe for living. . . .

http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/08/01/does-philosophy-matter/

Epstein, Joseph. "Heavy Sentences." THE NEW CRITERION (June 2011).

Fish, Stanley.  How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One.  New York: HarperCollins, 2011.

Fish’s central key to good writing, his Open Sesame, is to master forms of sentences, which can be imitated and later used with one’s own content when one comes to write one’s own compositions. Form, form, form, he implores, it is everything. “You shall tie yourself to forms,” he writes, “and forms will set you free.”

By forms Stanley Fish means the syntactical models found in the sentences of good writers, or sometimes even in grabber lines from movies, or even interviews with movie stars: “If you want to see the girl next door,” he recounts Joan Crawford saying, “go next door.” He serves up John Updike’s sentence about Ted Williams’s last home run in Fenway Park—“It was in the books while it was still in the sky”—as a form that can be made use of in one’s own writing by wringing changes on the original. “It was in my stomach while it was still on the shelf” is Fish’s example of such a change.

Fish’s first bit of instruction is that one practice wringing changes on these forms, over and over again, as a beginning music student might practice scales. “It may sound paradoxical,” he writes, “but verbal fluency is the product of hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.” He adds: “For the purposes of becoming a facile (in the positive sense) writer of sentences, the sentences you practice with should have as little meaning as possible.” Is this true? Taking the Updike sentence for my model, allow me to kitchen-test the method: “My toches was still in Chicago while my mind was in Biarritz”; “My mind was still in Vegas while my toches was in the Bodleian.” I fear it doesn’t do much for me, but perhaps I am too far gone for such warming-up exercises.

The larger point for Fish is that one learns to write

not by learning the rules [of grammar, syntax, and the rest], but by learning the limited number of relationships your words, phrases, and clauses can enter into, and becoming alert to those times when the relationships are not established or are unclear: when a phrase just dangles in space, when a connective has nothing to connect to, when a prepositional phrase is in search of a verb to complement, when a pronoun cannot be paired with a noun. . . .

http://www.newcriterion.com/articles.cfm/Heavy-sentences-7053

Fish, Stanley. "The Triumph of the Humanities." Opinionator Blog. NEW YORK TIMES June 13, 2011.

If interpretive methods and perspectives are necessary to the practice of geography, they are no less necessary to other projects supposedly separate from the project of the humanities. And that is why, in addition to GeoHumanities, we now have Biohumanities (“the humanities not only comment on the significance or implications of biological knowledge, but add to our understanding of biology itself” — Karola Stotz and Paul E. Griffiths), Disability Studies (of which the X-Men films might be both a representation and an instance), Metahistory (the study of the irreducibly narrative basis of historical “fact”), Law and Literature (the laying bare of the rhetorical and literary strategies giving form to every assertion in the law), Cultural Anthropology (an inquiry into the very possibility of anthropological observation that begins by acknowledging the inescapability of perspective and the ubiquity of interpretation), Cultural Sociology (“the commitment to hermeneutically reconstructing social texts in a rich and persuasive way” — Jeffrey C. Alexander and Philip Smith), and other hybrids already emergent and soon to emerge.

What this all suggests is that while we have been anguishing over the fate of the humanities, the humanities have been busily moving into, and even colonizing, the fields that were supposedly displacing them. In the ‘70s and the ‘80s the humanities exported theory to the social sciences and (with less influence) to the sciences; many disciplines saw a pitched battle between the new watchwords — perspective, contingency, dispersion, multi-vocality, intertextuality — and the traditional techniques of dispassionate observation, the collection of evidence, the drawing of warranted conclusions and the establishing of solid fact. Now the dust has settled and the invaded disciplines have incorporated much of what they resisted. Propositions that once seemed outlandish — all knowledge is mediated, even our certainties are socially constructed — are now routinely asserted in precincts where they were once feared as the harbingers of chaos and corrosive relativism.

One could say then that the humanities are the victors in the theory wars; nearly everyone now dances to their tune. But this conceptual triumph has not brought with it a proportionate share of resources or institutional support. Perhaps administrators still think of the humanities as the province of precious insights that offer little to those who are charged with the task of making sense of the world. Volumes like “GeoHumanities” tell a different story, and it is one that cannot be rehearsed too often.

Visit: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/06/13/the-triumph-of-the-humanities/.

Haslett, Adam. "How to Write a (Good) Sentence." SALON January 23, 2011.

Fish, Stanley.  How to Write a Sentence and How to Read One.  New York: HarperCollins, 2011.

This question of how forms of writing produce forms of thought is one that the literary critic and legal scholar Stanley Fish has been wrestling with most of his career. He first came to prominence in the late 1970s with his theory of "interpretative communities." This held that all readings of literary texts are inescapably bound up with the cultural assumptions of readers, an uncontroversial proposition now but one that quickly earned him the sloppy epithet of "relativist." In the late 1980s and early 1990s he turned the Duke University English department into the headquarters of the then-burgeoning "theory" industry before, in 1999, surprising the academic world by moving to the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he set himself the task of trying to renovate undergraduate education in basic skills like writing. Though he doesn't mention that experience in his new book, How To Write a Sentence and How To Read One, it's not far offstage. The problem with Strunk & White, in Fish's view, is that "they assume a level of knowledge and understanding only some of their readers will have attained," that is, the Cornell kids whose secondary education did at least a halfway decent job of teaching them the basics.

Fish's aim is to offer a guide to sentence craft and appreciation that is both deeper and more democratic. What, at base, is a sentence? he asks, and then goes on to argue that the standard answer based in parts of speech and rules of grammar teaches students "nothing about how to write." Instead, we should be examining the "logical relationships" within different sentence forms to see how they organize the world. His argument is that you can learn to write and later become a good writer by understanding and imitating these forms from many different styles. Thus, if you're drawn to Jonathan Swift's biting satire in the sentence, "Last week I saw a woman flayed, and you will hardly believe how much it altered her person for the worse," then, Fish advises, "Put together two mildly affirmative assertions, the second of which reacts to the first in a way that is absurdly inadequate." He offers, "Yesterday I saw a man electrocuted and it really was surprising how quiet he became." Lame, and hardly Swift, as Fish is the first to admit, but identifying the logical structure does specify how satire functions at the level of the sentence and, if you want to employ the form, that's a good thing to know. . . .

Visit: http://www.slate.com/id/2282086/.

Diski, Jenny. "Save It for HBO." LONDON REVIEW OF BOOKS March 17, 2011.

Fish, Stanley.  The Fugitive in Flight Faith, Liberalism, and Law in a Classic TV Show.  Pennsylvania: U of Pennsylvania P, 2010.

Academics: beware of loving what you write about. Fandom can tempt intellectuals to take uncharacteristic risks with their primary sources. Even Stanley Fish, who as the author of Is There a Text In This Class? knows better than anyone how important the division of insider and outsider is for keeping amateurs at bay. In 1993, Fish-the-fan, enamoured of the American television series The Fugitive, joined the faithful at a convention in Hollywood to rerun, adore and discuss the episodes, to listen to actors and directors of the programme talk about their experience. There’s probably an internally understood hierarchy of TV series obsessives, but I don’t know where Fugitive-heads come in relation to Trekkies, Python freaks or Dynasty divas. On the other hand, and at the same time, Fish-the-intellectual wanted to write a book about The Fugitive as it ‘celebrated and anatomised the ethic of mid-20th-century liberalism’, and, without doing a Christopher Ricks, who unnecessarily upgraded Bob Dylan’s songs to Great Poetry rather than the more-than-adequate great lyrics that they are, also wanted to claim that there was enough serious and educated thought behind the creation of the series to merit his academic attention. It is central to his essay that the people who conceived, pitched and wrote The Fugitive were not simply writing popular fiction in a winning formula but, in setting up the drama series and conceiving each episode, had the conscious intention to explore the same ideas as Fish does in writing about it. . . .

Visit: http://www.lrb.co.uk/v33/n06/jenny-diski/save-it-for-hbo.

Bauerlein, Mark. "A Solitary Thinker." CHRONICLE REVIEW May 15, 2011.

It is tempting to attribute Fish's enduring marquee value to professional savvy and provocative temper. Nobody else has slid in and out of controversy and dispute so often, nor has anyone proven so willing and able to combat conservatives and (sometimes) liberals in academic forums and nationwide media alike. Think of major debates in literary and cultural studies, and Fish is there—High Theory in the 70s, culture wars in the 80s, political correctness in the 90s, and ideological bias in the 2000s. Over time, the labels have accumulated and contradicted one another:

• "The scourge of Western civilization" (The New Yorker)
• "The willfully provocative, politically conservative law professor" (The New York Times Magazine)
• "Pied Piper of Relativism" (The Wall Street Journal)
• "Academic radical" (Roger Kimball)
• "Totalitarian Tinkerbell" (Camille Paglia)
• "He's One of Us!" (The Duke Review, a conservative student newspaper)
• "The High Priest of PC" (Minneapolis Star-Tribune)
• "A 53-year-old white male ... [who has] taught only traditional texts written by canonical male authors of the ultracanonical English Renaissance" (Fish on himself)

One could add the jeers that sprinkle comments on nearly every one of Fish's Times articles, as well as the accusations of radical subjectivism and sophistry by traditionalist academics from the 70s forward (a collection of essays about Fish's work is titled Postmodern Sophistry). Add up the judgments, and Fish's character lessens and simplifies. He's a polarizer, a provocateur, a controversialist, a casuist. For him, it's the game that counts, not the truth.

So goes the common opinion, but in truth it devalues Fish's thought and his disposition. Yes, Fish has adjusted his opinion about many things, but one root belief stands firm, which he summarized recently in a conversation with me: "Forms of knowledge are historically produced by men and women like you and me, and are therefore challengeable and revisable." Moreover, Fish has maintained the historicity of all truths and methods at complicated and crisis-ridden times, taking positions that have alternately inspired and affronted his colleagues. There's a pattern: Fish championed new ideas and interests at times of ferment and controversy, only to dissent when the profession absorbed those ideas and converted them into dogmas and reflexes. It was the trendiness and sectarianism of literary studies that made him seem ever tactical and adversarial. As theories and missions, at first fresh and creative, congealed into group outlooks, a nonconformist impulse burst through, a habit of mind partly for and partly against the pieties of the moment—which, of course, makes him the pious ones' most irritating colleague. . . .

Visit: http://chronicle.com/article/A-Solitary-Thinker/127464/.

Fish, Stanley. "Dorothy and the Tree: a Lesson in Epistemology." Opinionator Blog. NEW YORK TIMES April 25, 2011.

At one point in The Wizard Of Oz, Dorothy (Judy Garland) picks an apple and the tree she picks it off protests: “Well, how would you like to have someone come along and pick something off of you?” Dorothy is abashed and she says, “Oh, dear — I keep forgetting I’m not in Kansas,” by which she means she’s now entered an alternate universe where the usual distinctions between persons and objects, animate and inanimate, human beings and the natural world that is theirs to exploit do not hold. In Kansas and, she once assumed, everywhere else, trees are things you pick things off (even limbs) and persons are not. Persons have an autonomy and integrity of body that are to be respected; trees do not. A person who is maimed has a legal cause of action. A tree that has been cut down has no legal recourse, although there may be a cause of action (not, however, on behalf of the tree) if it was cut down by someone other than the owner of the property it stood on.

All this seems obvious, but what the tree’s question to Dorothy shows is that the category of the obvious can be challenged and unsettled. . . .  Hers is not a failure of memory. Hers is not a failure at all, but the inevitable and blameless consequence of having a consciousness informed by certain assumptions about the classification of items in the world, assumptions that deliver those items already catalogued and labeled, exactly in the manner Darwin labels those to whom sympathy is being extended “lower animals” and drops the adjective “useless” ever so casually, that is, without thinking. Rorty is no less limited (not a criticism, but a description) in his vision of things when he restricts the category of the unjustly marginalized to “people.” What about cats, trees, stones, streams and cockroaches?

The obvious answer to this not entirely frivolous question is, “you can’t think of everything,” and that’s the right answer. Despite imperatives like “broaden your thinking” or “extend your horizons or “widen your sense of ‘us,’” thought is not an expandable muscle that can contain or comprehend an infinite number of things. Thought is a structure that at once enables perception — it is within and by virtue of thought’s finite categories that items emerge and can be pointed to — and limits perception; no structure of thought can enable the seeing of all items, a capacity reserved for God. It follows that when you have a change of mind (of the kind the tree is trying to provoke when it addresses Dorothy) you won’t see more; you will see differently. A system of distinctions (and that is what thought is) will always privilege some categories of being and devalue others, sometimes even to the extent of not recognizing them. And when one system is succeeded by another and new things come into view, some old things will have been consigned to the category of chimera and, except for histories of error, will have vanished from sight. (Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolution is a primer on the process.) . . .

Read the rest here: http://www.blogger.com/post-create.g?blogID=1700945566886988248.

See the follow-up article, "Ideas and Theory: the Political Difference," here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2011/05/02/ideas-and-theory-the-political-difference/.

Fish, Stanley. "Deep in the Heart of Texas." Opinionator Blog. New York Times June 21, 2010.

Student evaluations (against which I have inveighed since I first saw them in the ’60s) are all wrong as a way of assessing teaching performance: they measure present satisfaction in relation to a set of expectations that may have little to do with the deep efficacy of learning. Students tend to like everything neatly laid out; they want to know exactly where they are; they don’t welcome the introduction of multiple perspectives, especially when no master perspective reconciles them; they want the answers.

But sometimes (although not always) effective teaching involves the deliberate inducing of confusion, the withholding of clarity, the refusal to provide answers; sometimes a class or an entire semester is spent being taken down various garden paths leading to dead ends that require inquiry to begin all over again, with the same discombobulating result; sometimes your expectations have been systematically disappointed. And sometimes that disappointment, while extremely annoying at the moment, is the sign that you’ve just been the beneficiary of a great course, although you may not realize it for decades.

Needless to say, that kind of teaching is unlikely to receive high marks on a questionnaire that rewards the linear delivery of information and penalizes a pedagogy that probes, discomforts and fails to provide closure. Student evaluations, by their very nature, can only recognize, and by recognizing encourage, assembly-line teaching that delivers a nicely packaged product that can be assessed as easily and immediately as one assesses the quality of a hamburger. . . .

Read the rest here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/21/deep-in-the-heart-of-texas/.

Fish, Stanley. "Styles of Judging: the Rhetoric and the Reality." OPINIONATOR BLOG. NEW YORK TIMES June 14, 2010.

The upcoming judiciary committee hearings on the nomination of Elena Kagan to be an associate justice of the Supreme Court will likely unfold under the shadow of Chief Justice John G. Roberts’ declaration (at his own hearing) that “judges are like umpires; umpires don’t make the rules, they apply them.” Kagan will probably be asked to pledge allegiance to this account of judging and repudiate its disreputable alternative — judges who make law, legislate from the bench and import their politics into precincts where they don’t belong.

In a new book, Beyond the Formalist-Realist Divide: The Role of Politics in Judging, Brian Z. Tamanaha first describes the opposition that has such a hold on the public’s imagination — on the one hand “self-applying legal rules,” on the other “judges pursuing their personal preferences beneath a veneer of legal rules” — and then debunks it. His argument is that although historians, legal theorists, political scientists and sometimes judges themselves have over time constructed a “standard chronicle” in which these two views of judging vie for supremacy, no one has ever been a genuine adherent of either: “No one thinks that law is autonomous and judging is mechanical deduction, and rare is the jurist who thinks that judges are engaged in the single minded pursuit of their personal preferences.”

Why then has what Tamanaha calls “this myth” managed to flourish? One answer is that it serves the ends of those who wish to accuse one another of bad judicial behavior. . . .

Read the rest here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/06/14/styles-of-judging-the-rhetoric-and-the-reality/.

Fish, Stanley. "Does Reason Know What It Is Missing?" NEW YORK TIMES April 12, 2010.

Habermas, Jurgen. An Awareness of What is Missing. Trans. Ciaran Cronin. Cambridge: Polity, 2010. The German philosopher Jürgen Habermas has long been recognized as the most persistent and influential defender of an Enlightenment rationality that has been attacked both by postmodernism, which derides formal reason’s claims of internal coherence and neutrality, and by various fundamentalisms, which subordinate reason to religious imperatives that sweep everything before them, often not stopping at violence. In his earlier work, Habermas believed, as many did, that the ambition of religion to provide a foundation of social cohesion and normative guidance could now, in the Modern Age, be fulfilled by the full development of human rational capacities harnessed to a “discourse ethics” that admitted into the conversation only propositions vying for the status of “better reasons,” with “better” being determined by a free and open process rather than by presupposed ideological or religious commitments: “the authority of the holy,” he once declared, “is gradually replaced by the authority of an achieved consensus.” In recent years, however, Habermas’s stance toward religion has changed. First, he now believes that religion is not going away and that it will continue to play a large and indispensable part in many societies and social movements. And second, he believes that in a post-secular age — an age that recognizes the inability of the secular to go it alone — some form of interaction with religion is necessary: “Among the modern societies, only those that are able to introduce into the secular domain the essential contents of their religious traditions which point beyond the merely human realm will also be able to rescue the substance of the human.” The question of course is what does Habermas mean by “introduce”? How exactly is the cooperation between secular reason and faith to be managed? Habermas attempted to answer that question in the course of a dialogue with four Jesuit academics who met with him in Munich in 2007. The proceedings have now been published. . . . Read the rest here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/04/12/does-reason-know-what-it-is-missing/.

Fish, Stanley. "Pragmatism’s Gift." NEW YORK TIMES March 15, 2010.

Margolis, Joseph. Pragmatism's Advantage: American and European Philosophy at the End of the Twentieth Century. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2010. Like any philosophy pragmatism offers answers to the questions the tradition of philosophical inquiry has been asking since its beginning. What is truth? What is real? How are we to act? What is the source of moral and/or epistemological authority? Pragmatism’s basic move is to declare that the answers to these questions will not be found by identifying some transcendental universal and then conforming ourselves to its normative demands (like “Be ye perfect”). Rather, we must, and can, make do with the “ordinary aptitudes of human beings (ourselves) viewed within a generously Darwinized ecology, without transcendental, revelatory, or privileged presumptions of any kind.” Pragmatism “completely undermines any assurances, empirical or transcendental, that exceed the provisionality of what we may consensually construct (in our own time) as a workable conjecture about the way the world is.” I quote from Joseph Margolis’s new book Pragmatism’s Advantage, which is, he says, that it is among the “very small number of Western philosophical movements … that … never exceed the natural competence and limitations of mere human being.” Why is that an advantage? Because, Margolis asserts, it avoids having to choose between “the alleged necessity of some ineliminable invariance in thought and/or reality” and some wholesale subjectivism or idealism that claims “that the natural world is itself constituted or constructed by the cognizing mind.” On the one hand, no “transcendental faculty” of reason or some other quasi-deity that will guide us infallibly if only we attach ourselves to it (not that there haven’t been any candidates for this honored position; there have in fact been many, too many). On the other hand, no surrender to the “preposterous doctrine” that we just make it all up as we go along. Instead pragmatism, Margolis explains, “favors a constructive (or constructivist) realism … freed from every form of cognitive, rational, and practical privilege … [and] committed to the continuities of animal nature and human culture, confined to the existential and historical contingencies of the human condition, and open in principle to plural, partial, perspectived, provisional, even nonconverging ways of understanding.” Quite a mouthful, but we can make it manageable by asking just what is a “constructive realism”? In the vocabulary pragmatism rejects, “realism” is (among other things) the thesis that (a) the world is independent of us and our thoughts, and (b) therefore our thoughts (or interpretations or calculations) should always be checked against, and evaluated as adequate or inadequate by, that independent and prior world. Pragmatists by and large accept (a), but not (b). They believe with Richard Rorty (a key figure in the revival of pragmatism in the last quarter of the 20th century) that “things in space and time are the effects of causes which do not include mental states” — the world, in short, is “out there” — but they also believe that the knowledge we have (or think we have) of the world is given not by it, but by men and women who are hazarding descriptions within the vocabularies and paradigms (Thomas Kuhn’s word) that are in place and in force in their cultures. Those descriptions are judged to be true or false, accurate or inaccurate, according to measures and procedures that currently have epistemic authority, and not according to their fit with the world as it exists independently of any description. If a philosophy doesn’t have a real world payoff, what’s the use of it? While there surely is such a world, our only access to it, Rorty and Margolis say, is through our own efforts to apprehend it. Margolis: “The real world … is not a construction of mind or Mind … but the paradigm of knowledge or science is certainly confined to the discursive powers of the human.” Thus the content of realism — of what the best up-to-date accounts of the world tell us — is constructively determined by the workings of a culture-bound process of hypothesis, experiment, test and calculation that is itself a constructed artifact and as such can change even as it guides and assesses research. In the absence of the alternative pragmatism rejects — something called Mind equipped with something called reason which enables it to describe accurately something called the World (Bacon’s dream) — “realism cannot fail to be constructivist, though reality is not itself … constructed” (Margolis). A constructive realism will still make use of words like “true” and “better,” but these are judgments that a proposition is or is not warranted — has sufficient evidence backing it up — within the prevailing paradigms. (What higher judgment could here be? Kuhn asks.) In the event of a paradigm change — not an event that can be predicted or planned; it takes the form of conversion not demonstration — there will be new canons of evidence and new measures of warrant. Notice how far this is from saying that “anything goes.” At any moment the protocols and procedures in place will enforce a rigor of method and interpretation; it is just that the rigor lives and has its shape entirely within “the existential and historical contingencies of the human situation” and not in a realm of extra-human verification and validation, whether that realm be theological, philosophical or empirical. The implications of the pragmatist argument are at once far reaching and unthreatening. They are far reaching because, as Margolis points out, “If realism takes a constructivist turn, then all the normative features of the sciences (say truth and validity) must be constructivist as well — as … our moral and political norms would be.” These implications are unthreatening because if the pragmatist account is right it is describing what has always been the case. When Margolis announces that there are “no privileged faculties, no preestablished harmony, no exceptionless universals, no assured natural necessities … no escape from the contingencies of whatever we report as ‘given’ within human experience,” he is not ushering in a new age, but describing the necessary condition of all the old ones. It has ever been thus (again, if pragmatism is right), and yet the world’s business has always been done. . . . Read he rest here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/15/pragmatisms-gift/.

Fish, Stanley. "The True Answer and the Right Answer." THINK AGAIN BLOG. NEW YORK TIMES January 11, 2010.

The right answer is the answer a system invested in its own machinery will recognize no matter what the true facts may be. . . .  This is almost always the case in the law, especially in a legal system like ours that privileges procedure over substance. Lawyers know that what they have to do is find the legal rubric that will allow them to frame an issue in such a way that when the system’s questions are posed, the right answer, not the true answer, will be generated. Courts sometimes explicitly announce that the procedurally correct answer is preferable to the true answer, which is, legally, of no interest at all. . . .

Should we go off the right standard and return to the true standard? A nice idea, but one that imagines a world where the judgments reached by systems are tested against a truth that is independent of any system. Where would that truth come from, how would it be identified and how could the endless disputes about what it is be resolved? (The law’s project is to hold such disputes at bay.) It is because there are no answers to these questions that we will have to settle for the truths that systems create, deliver and validate in a sequence that may be reassuring but is finally without a foundation.

Read the rest here: http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/01/11/the-true-answer-and-the-right-answer/.

Fish, Stanley. "What Should Colleges Teach? Part 3." THINK AGAIN BLOG. NEW YORK TIMES September 7, 2009.

I write a third column on the teaching of writing in colleges and universities because three important questions posed by a large number of posters remain unanswered: (1) Isn’t the mastery of forms something that should be taught in high school or earlier? (2) Isn’t extensive reading the key to learning how to write? (3) What would a composition course based on the method I urge look like? Questions (1) and (2) can be answered briefly. Question (3) is, as they say, a work in progress. . . . Read the rest here: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/09/07/what-should-colleges-teach-part-3/.

Fish, Stanley. "What Should Colleges Teach?" THINK AGAIN BLOG. NEW YORK TIMES August 27, 2009.

The arguments pro and con are familiar. On one side the assertion that a core curriculum provides students with the distilled wisdom of the western tradition and prepares them for life. On the other side the assertion that a core curriculum packages and sells the prejudices and biases of the reigning elite and so congeals knowledge rather than advancing it. Have we lost our way or finally found it? Thirty-five years ago there was no such thing as a gay and lesbian studies program; now you can build a major around it. For some this development is a sign that a brave new world has arrived; for others it marks the beginning of the end of civilization. It probably is neither; curricular alternatives are just not that world-shaking. The philosophical baggage that burdens this debate should be jettisoned and replaced with a more prosaic question: What can a core curriculum do that the proliferation of options and choices (two words excoriated in the ACTA report) cannot? The answer to that question is given early in the report before it moves on to its more polemical pages. An “important benefit of a coherent core curriculum is its ability to foster a ‘common conversation’ among students, connecting them more closely with faculty and with each other.” The nice thing about this benefit is that it can be had no matter what the content of the core curriculum is. It could be the classics of western literature and philosophy. It could be science fiction. It could be globalization. It could be anything so long as every student took it. But whatever it is, please let it include a writing course that teaches writing and not everything under the sun. That should be the real core of any curriculum. . . . Read the rest here: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/08/24/what-should-colleges-teach/.

Fish, Stanley. "God Talk, Part 2." THINK AGAIN BLOG. NEW YORK TIMES May 17, 2009.

According to recent surveys, somewhere between 79 and 92 percent of Americans believe in God. But if the responses to my column on Terry Eagleton’s “Faith, Reason and Revolution” constitute a representative sample, 95 percent of Times readers don’t. What they do believe, apparently, is that religion is a fairy tale, hogwash, balderdash, nonsense and a device for rationalizing horrible deeds. Of course, there is more than name-calling to their antitheism; there are arguments, and the one most often made insists on a sharp distinction between religion and science, or, alternatively, between faith and reason. The assertion, generally, is that while “science is based on observation, religion is based on opinion” (RM Paxton) Or, in another formulation, science does not involve belief, it is “based on common observation” (Dave Goldenberg). Science “simply reports facts” (Bob W.) Or, in the same vein, “Science helps us to understand the world as it is” (Mark Grein). In short, while science provides a window on the world, religion places between us and the world a fog of doctrine and superstition, and if we want to become clear-eyed, we have to dispel (a word that should be taken literally) that fog. This is the promise offered by Christopher Hitchens, who tells his readers (in “God is Not Great”), “You will feel better . . . once you leave hold of the doctrinaire and allow your chainless mind to do its own thinking.” (Thinkers of the world, unite; you have nothing to lose but your chains.) Sounds good, sounds simple. Just free the mind of pre-packaged beliefs and take a good look at things. But is it that easy? Is observation a matter simply of opening up your baby blues and taking note of the evidence that presents itself? Does evidence come labeled as such – “I am evidence for thesis X but not Y”? Read the rest here: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/17/god-talk-part-2/. There have been many reactions to this column, including the following:

• http://leiterreports.typepad.com/blog/2009/05/does-the-ny-times-not-realize-that-stanley-fish-is-philosophically-incompetent.html (NB: degenerates, sadly, into the usual ad hominem attacks)
• http://enowning.blogspot.com/
• http://foucaultblog.wordpress.com/2009/05/18/is-anything-left-of-stan-fish/

For a brief overview of Fish's position on the relationship between knowledge and belief, see: http://www.rockymountainnews.com/news/2008/feb/20/campos-the-atheists-dilemma/.

Fish, Stanley. "God Talk." THINK AGAIN BLOG. NEW YORK TIMES May 3, 2009.

Eagleton, Terry. Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate. New Haven: Yale UP, 2009. In the opening sentence of the last chapter of his new book, Reason, Faith and Revolution, the British critic Terry Eagleton asks, “Why are the most unlikely people, including myself, suddenly talking about God?” His answer, elaborated in prose that is alternately witty, scabrous and angry, is that the other candidates for guidance — science, reason, liberalism, capitalism — just don’t deliver what is ultimately needed. “What other symbolic form,” he queries, “has managed to forge such direct links between the most universal and absolute of truths and the everyday practices of countless millions of men and women?” Eagleton acknowledges that the links forged are not always benign — many terrible things have been done in religion’s name — but at least religion is trying for something more than local satisfactions, for its “subject is nothing less than the nature and destiny of humanity itself, in relation to what it takes to be its transcendent source of life.” And it is only that great subject, and the aspirations it generates, that can lead, Eagleton insists, to “a radical transformation of what we say and do.” The other projects, he concedes, provide various comforts and pleasures, but they are finally superficial and tend to the perpetuation of the status quo rather than to meaningful change: “A society of packaged fulfillment, administered desire, managerialized politics and consumerist economics is unlikely to cut to the depth where theological questions can ever be properly raised.” . . . Read the rest here: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/05/03/god-talk/.

Fish, Stanley. "Faith and Deficits." THINK AGAIN BLOG. NEW YORK TIMES March 1, 2009.

Talk about the economy is everywhere, and the same things are being said. We’re in a deep hole. We may not be able to dig ourselves out. We’re underwater. Our assets are overwhelmed by our debts, which keep growing. The question is who or what can get us out of this mess? Some answer Obama. Some (a much smaller group) say Geithner. Some (in desperation) say China. But others say Jesus Christ. At first glance, Christian doctrine and economic exigencies seem unrelated, but in recent days I have come across two different ways of bringing them together. . . . Find out what these are here: http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/03/01/faith-and-deficits/.

Kellman, Steven G. "Education for Education's Sake." CHRONICLE OF HIGHER EDUCATION September 5, 2008.

Fish, Stanley. Save the World on Your Own Time. Oxford: OUP, 2008. To counter the old Platonic charge that poetry is mendacity, that conjuring worlds up out of words is lying, Sir Philip Sidney devised a clever strategy. The poet "nothing affirmeth, and therefore never lieth," contended Sidney, relieving literature of responsibility for veracity. At the beginning of his poem "Anecdote of the Jar," Wallace Stevens declares: "I placed a jar in Tennessee," but it would be ludicrous to demand eyewitness corroboration or photographic evidence. Stevens scholars do not waste their time excavating berms near Knoxville in search of shards of jars. While the poet appears to be making a statement, it is really a pseudostatement, subject to neither verification nor nullification. Although it liberated poetry, Sidney's gambit also trivialized it. If modern poetry, asserting its autonomy, says nothing, it says it to an evaporating pool of readers. To counter widespread accusations that college instruction is mendacity, inaccuracy, indoctrination, or treason, Stanley Fish adopts a strategy similar to Sidney's. Declaring that "poetry is the liberal arts activity par excellence," he pushes back against pressures from trustees, legislators, corporations, students, parents, alumni, and other taxpayers who would deny the autonomy of higher education. Insisting that, like poetry, liberal-arts education "makes no claim to efficacy beyond the confines of its performance," Fish is in effect proclaiming that college teachers are pseudoprofessors; they profess nothing. . . . Read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/free/v55/i02/02b00801.htm.

MLA 2008: Exciting Tidbits.

Visit the Modern Language Association 2008 Convention homepage here: http://www.mla.org/convention. Jaschik, Scott. "David Horowitz Does the MLA." Inside Higher Ed December 30, 2008:

It’s not standard practice at meetings of the Modern Language Association to have visible security or a roped-off divide between the dais for speakers and the audience. But it’s not every MLA meeting that features David Horowitz, who has spent years attacking the group. . . . (read the rest here: http://insidehighered.com/news/2008/12/30/horowitz)

Howard, Jennifer. "MLA 2008: a Buyer's Market?" Chronicle of Higher Education December 30, 2008:

So Harvard’s not hiring this year, and it’s not alone. A lot of language-and-literature departments, though, are proceeding with searches — for now. How much do the job jitters extend to the employers’ side of the interviewing table? The Chronicle talked to professors on several search committees to find out. . . . (read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/news/article/5720/mla-2008-a-buyers-market.)

McMillen, Liz. "Politics in the Classroom, Stanley Fish Style." Chronicle of Higher Education December 29, 2008:

MLA attendees packed into an overflowing room yesterday to hear Patricia Lynn Bizzell, Judith Butler, and Jonathan Culler, along with Mr. Fish himself, dissect Mr. Fish’s latest book, Save the World on Your Own Time (Oxford University Press). Although the discussion here was civil and even good-natured, Mr. Fish annoys people on both the left and the right by maintaining that politics has no role in the classroom and that inculcating values such as social justice and citizenship in students amounts to hubris. . . . (read the rest here: http://chronicle.com/news/article/5716/politics-in-the-classroom-stanley-fish-style)

Van Engen, Abram. "Teaching Life, with Restraint." BOOKS AND CULTURE August 11, 2008.

Fish, Stanley. Save the World on Your Own Time. Oxford: OUP, 2008. In his latest work on higher education, Fish argues that academics need to leave their proselytizing behind. Professors are not in the business of urging politics or values. Their only job is to introduce students to bodies of knowledge and equip them with analytical skills. That's it. Teachers analyze; they do not advocate—not, at least, in the classroom. Coming from one of the premier postmodern theorists—someone who helped convince us that nothing is neutral—this position seems somewhat remarkable. In 1991, for example, Fish argued that religious people should accept no place in the academy because their firm beliefs were not open to a marketplace of ideas. George Marsden responded in The Outrageous Idea of Christian Scholarship that "Christians and non-Christians can readily share basic standards of evidence and argument." The classroom is a context requiring certain forms of behavior and restraint: "in the very nature of human life," Marsden wrote, "we routinely move from one field of activity to another, each with its own set of rules." Fish, it seems, now agrees. In life, he writes, "we refrain … from inserting our religious beliefs or our private obsessions into every situation or conversation no matter what its content." The classroom, likewise, calls for restraint. It is not a place for partisan politics—even of the most bland and seemingly universal sort, like "tolerance." We do not teach tolerance, says Fish, we teach physics or poetry or psychology: bodies of knowledge, sets of skills. . . . Read the rest here: http://www.christianitytoday.com/books/features/bookwk/080811.html.