Quote

Many people on the political left found my work psychologically liberating. They began to say: once you realize that standards emerge historically, then you can see through and discard all the norms to which we have been falsely enslaved.

Stanley Fish

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Stanley Fish
Age: 86
Born: 1938
Born: April 19
Historian
Journalist
Literary Critic
Philosopher
Scholar
University Teacher
Writer
Providence
Rhode Island
Stanley Eugene Fish
Realizing
Psychologically
Left
Historically
Found
Emerge
Political
Liberating
Many
Norm
Falsely
Work
Began
Discard
People
Standards
Norms
Realize
Enslaved

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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.
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Freedom of speech is not an academic value. Accuracy of speech is an academic value completeness of speech is an academic value relevance of speech is an academic value. Each of these is directly related to the goal of academic inquiry: getting a matter of fact right.
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I do not support abortion rights. Although what I would support in this vexed area is not clear to me.
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Sentences can save us. Who could ask for anything more?
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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.
Stanley Fish
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We in universities are not in the democracy business. What we do, when we're doing it, is teach and learn.
Stanley Fish
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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.
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Any idea can be brought into the classroom if the point is to inquire into its structure, history, influence and so forth. But no idea belongs in the classroom if the point of introducing it is to recruit your students for the political agenda it may be thought to imply.
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Just as you can practice three-word sentences or sentences that travel across time zones, so can you practice writing sentences that breathe unshakable conviction.
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In general, higher education does not know how to speak for its interests. It offers a stance that is defensive, cowardly and likely to be ineffective.
Stanley Fish
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The category of first sentence makes sense only if it is looking forward to the development of thematic concerns it perhaps only dimly foreshadows.
Stanley Fish
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Sentence writers are not copyists they are selectors.
Stanley Fish
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Know what makes a sentence more than a random list, practice constructing sentences and explaining what you have done, and you will know how to make sentences forever and you will know too when what you are writing doesn't make the grade because it has degenerated into a mere pile of discrete items.
Stanley Fish
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Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.
Stanley Fish
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Despite the apparent absoluteness of the First Amendment, there are any number of ways of getting around it, ways that are known to any student of law. In general, the strategy is to manipulate the distinction between speech and action which is at bottom a distinction between inconsequential and consequential behavior.
Stanley Fish
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No word floats without an anchoring connection within an overall structure.
Stanley Fish
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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.
Stanley Fish
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The idea - the core idea of humanism - is that the act of reading about great deeds will lead you to imitate them.
Stanley Fish
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It is always incorrect to assume you can know what someone's moral convictions are based on their philosophical theories.
Stanley Fish
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I should have known better. Pro-life arguments are now based on scientific evidence and the pro-choice arguments are not. That is a cultural, historical fact.
Stanley Fish