The Trouble with Principle
eBook - PDF

The Trouble with Principle

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

The Trouble with Principle

About this book

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.

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Yes, you can access The Trouble with Principle by Stanley Fish in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Philosophy & Public Law. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright
  4. Contents
  5. Dedication
  6. Prologue: Taking Sides
  7. Part I. Politics All the Way Down
  8. Part II. Fish on the First
  9. Part III. Reasons for the Devout
  10. Part IV. Credo
  11. Epilogue: How the Right Hijacked the Magic Words
  12. Notes
  13. Acknowledgments
  14. Index