Stanley Fish Quotes
Belief and knowledge are considered to be two different things. But they are not.
Fish, Stanley. Is There a Text in This Class? The Authority of Interpretive Communities. Harvard University Press, 1980.
Any politician who is absolutely sure of anything he/she advocates has got to be ignorant of many of the facts and concepts about the subject. Certainty is an extreme form of hubris.
Bundy was discussing various Vietnam scenarios with a former White House aide who challenged several assumptions and asked Bundy what would happen if the North Vietnamese would escalate their ground war in the South in retaliation for U. S. bombing. Bundy sated that he didn't believe that would happen, but Hughes asked him to assume it would and discuss the consequence.
This seemingly abstruse philosophical statement actually found its way into one of the major political debates of the 21st Century when the Secretary of Defense was defending the management of the Iraq War and the interpretation of intelligence. See {586062}.
Stanley Eugene Fish is 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, although Fish has no degrees or training in law. 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.
