Stanley Fish
Stanley Fish
Stanley Eugene Fishis an American literary theorist, legal scholar, author and public intellectual. He is currently the Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University's Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law in New York City. Fish has previously served as the Davidson-Kahn Distinguished University Professor of Humanities and a professor of law at Florida International University and is dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionWriter
Date of Birth19 April 1938
CountryUnited States of America
A pro-choice advocate sees abortion as a decision to be made in accordance with the best scientific opinion as to when the beginning of life, as we know it, occurs.
Sentence writers are not copyists; they are selectors.
People write or speak sentences in order to produce an effect, and the success of a sentence is measured by the degree to which the desired effect has been achieved.
Language is not a handmaiden to perception; it is perception; it gives shape to what would otherwise be inert and dead.
Sentences can save us. Who could ask for anything more?
We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.
Opinion-sharing sessions are like junk food: they fill you up with starch and leave you feeling both sated and hungry. A sustained inquiry into the truth of a matter is an almost athletic experience; it may exhaust you, but it also improves you.
Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.
It may sound paradoxical, but verbal fluency is the product of many hours spent writing about nothing, just as musical fluency is the product of hours spent repeating scales.
It is of no help to us that there is an absolute truth of the matter of things because unfortunately, none of us are in a position to say definitively what that is - although we all think that we are.
The idea - the core idea of humanism - is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them,..
What we know of the world comes to us through words, or, to look at it from the other direction, when we write a sentence, we create a world, which is not the world, but the world as is appears within a dimension of assessment.
The first thing to ask when writing a sentence is 'What am I trying to do?'
This is what language does: organize the world into manageable, and in some sense artificial, units that can then be inhabited and manipulated.