Stanley Fish is doing his Brendan O’Neill act. There is no view from nowhere, therefore no claim is better founded than any other claim, it’s all just likes and dislikes.  [D]espite invocations of fairness and equality and giving every voice a chance, classical liberals, like any other ideologues  (and ideologues we all are),  divide the [...]...

He is bothered by “the spectacle of a court declaring with a straight face that the state-mandated display of crucifixes has nothing to do with religion or indoctrination.”… Read the rest

Liberal universalism has superficial respect for everyone (as long as everyone is superficial) and deep respect for no one, according to Fish.… Read the rest

There is still something missing, he moans.… Read the rest

Another demonstration that atheism is simply not permissible.

But does criticism equate to McCarthyism?

Fish thinks the classical liberal tradition of Locke, Mill, and Rawls leads to an impoverishment of politics.… Read the rest

This one by Steven Smith, who says there are no secular reasons. Fish is impressed.… Read the rest

The man is the center of the universe and the women compete for his attention; what’s not to like?… Read the rest

No free speech, good thing too. Muslim sensitivities; culture riddled with own taboos; no wonder angry.… Read the rest

What was involved was less the rejection of the rationalist tradition than an interrogation of its key components.… Read the rest

Any views presented should be offered as objects of analysis rather than as candidates for allegiance.… Read the rest

Disgusting nonsense at that.… Read the rest

Two philosophers, others, take him to task.… Read the rest

Skeptical of tendency to blur distinction between scholarship and politics.… Read the rest

‘The only respectable intellectual goal is the pursuit of truth’… Read the rest

Massimo Pigliucci says why Fish is wrong and silly.

[T]he problem lies with Fish’s cheap rhetorical trick: Stanley seems to think that once one has refuted the naive logical positivist view that human beings can adopt a purely objective viewpoint and grasp reality for what it actually is (a position that in philosophy has been abandoned since the 1950s, by the way), voilà, all knowledge has ultimately been shown to be a matter of faith…It is simply not true, as our friend cavalierly maintains, that “once the act of simply reporting or simply observing is exposed as a fiction — as something that just can’t be done — the facile opposition between faith-thinking and thinking grounded in independent evidence

… Read the rest

‘Now here comes that most odius and content-free New York Times columnist, Stanley Fish…’… Read the rest

It’s funny about that article of Stanley Fish’s, because I don’t always disagree with him on the subject. I agree with much of what he says in the article ‘There’s No Such Thing as Free Speech’. This for instance –

In saying this, I would not be heard as arguing either for or against regulation and speech codes as a matter of general principle. Instead my argument turns away from general principle to the pragmatic (anti)principle of considering each situation as it emerges. The question of whether or not to regulate will always be a local one, and we cannot rely on abstractions that are either empty of content or filled with the content of some partisan agenda to generate

… Read the rest

Stanley Fish likes to play Confuse a Cat sometimes. So it seems at least.

This is what it means today to put self-censorship “on the agenda”: the particular object of that censorship – be it opinions about a religion, a movie, the furniture in a friend’s house, your wife’s new dress, whatever – is a matter of indifference. What is important is not the content of what is expressed but that it be expressed. What is important is that you let it all hang out.

My wife’s new dress? But I don’t have a wife. Does he think only men read the NY Times? Does he think women are too busy buying new dresses to read it? Strange guy. But … Read the rest