Editing Stanley Fish (section)

==Criticisms of his work==
As a frequent contributor to ''[[The New York Times]]''<ref>[http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/ New York Times: Stanley Fish] {{Webarchive|url=https://web.archive.org/web/20061107004252/http://fish.blogs.nytimes.com/ |date=November 7, 2006 }}, nytimes.com; accessed January 11, 2018.</ref> and ''[[The Wall Street Journal]]'' editorial page, Fish has been the target of wide-ranging criticism.

Writing in ''[[Slate (magazine)|Slate]]'' magazine, [[Judith Shulevitz]] reported that not only does Fish openly proclaim himself "unprincipled" but also rejects wholesale the concepts of "fairness, impartiality, reasonableness." To Fish, "ideas have no consequences." For taking this stance, Shulevitz characterizes Fish as "not the unprincipled relativist he's accused of being. He's something worse. He's a fatalist."<ref>''Slate''. [http://www.slate.com/id/1004257 The Indefensible Stanley Fish], slate.com; accessed January 11, 2018.</ref>

Likewise, among academics, Fish has endured vigorous criticism. The conservative [[R. V. Young]] writes, {{cquote|Because his general understanding of human nature and of the human condition is false, Fish fails in the specific task of a university scholar, which requires that learning be placed in the service of truth. And this, finally, is the critical issue in the contemporary university of which Stanley Fish is a typical representative: sophistry renders truth itself equivocal and deprives scholarly learning of its reason for being... . His brash disdain of principle and his embrace of sophistry reveal the hollowness hidden at the heart of the current academic enterprise.<ref>R.V. Young [http://www.encyclopedia.com/doc/1G1-113525437.html Modern Age], encyclopedia.com; accessed January 11, 2018.</ref>}}

[[Terry Eagleton]], a prominent British Marxist,<ref>''The Independent.''[https://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/terry-eagleton-class-warrior-396770.html "Terry Eagleton: Class Warrior."]</ref> excoriates Fish's "discreditable [[epistemology]]" as "sinister". According to Eagleton, "Like almost all diatribes against [[Universality (philosophy)|universalism]], Fish's critique of universalism has its own rigid universals: the priority at all times and places of sectoral interests, the permanence of conflict, the a priori status of belief systems, the rhetorical character of truth, the fact that all apparent openness is secretly closure, and the like." Of Fish's attempt to co-opt the critiques leveled against him, Eagleton responds, "The felicitous upshot is that nobody can ever criticise Fish, since if their criticisms are intelligible to him, they belong to his cultural game and are thus not really criticisms at all; and if they are not intelligible, they belong to some other set of conventions entirely and are therefore irrelevant."<ref>Eagleton, Terry. ''London Review of Books''. [https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v22/n05/terry-eagleton/the-estate-agent "The Estate Agent"]; accessed January 11, 2018.</ref>

In the essay "Sophistry about Conventions", philosopher [[Martha Nussbaum]] argues that Fish's theoretical views are based on "extreme relativism and even radical subjectivism." Discounting his work as nothing more than [[sophistry]], Nussbaum claims that Fish "relies on the regulative principle of non-contradiction in order to adjudicate between competing principles", thereby relying on normative standards of argumentation even as he argues against them.  Offering an alternative, Nussbaum cites [[John Rawls]]'s work in ''[[A Theory of Justice]]'' to highlight "an example of a rational argument; it can be said to yield, in a perfectly recognizable sense, ethical truth." Nussbaum appropriates Rawls's critique of the insufficiencies of Utilitarianism, showing that a rational person will consistently prefer a system of justice that acknowledges boundaries between separate persons rather than relying on the aggregation of the sum total of desires. "This", she claims, "is altogether different from rhetorical manipulation."<ref>Nussbaum, Martha C. ''Love's Knowledge.'' "Sophistry About Conventions", New York: Oxford University Press, 1990. pp. 220-29.</ref>

[[Camille Paglia]], author of ''[[Sexual Personae]]'' and [[public intellectual]], denounced Fish as a "totalitarian Tinkerbell," charging him with hypocrisy for lecturing about multiculturalism from the perspective of a tenured professor at the homogeneous and sheltered ivory tower of Duke.<ref>[http://gos.sbc.edu/p/paglia.html Gifts of Speech &mdash; Camille Paglia], gos.sbc.edu; accessed January 11, 2018.</ref>

David Hirsch, a critic of post-structuralist influences on [[hermeneutics]], censured Fish for "lapses in logical rigor" and "carelessness toward rhetorical precision." In an examination of Fish's arguments, Hirsch attempts to demonstrate that "not only was a restoration of New Critical methods unnecessary, but that Fish himself had not managed to rid himself of the shackles of New Critical theory."  Hirsch compares Fish's work to Penelope's loom in the ''[[Odyssey]]'', stating, "what one critic weaves by day, another unweaves by night."  "Nor," he writes, "does this weaving and unweaving constitute a dialectic, since no forward movement takes place."  Ultimately, Hirsch sees Fish as left to "wander in his own [[Elysian]] fields, hopelessly alienated from art, from truth, and from humanity."<ref>Hirsch, David H.  ''The Deconstruction of Literature: Criticism after Auschwitz''.  Hanover, New Hampshire:  University Press of New England, 1991. pp. 4, 22&ndash;28, 68.</ref>