The Trouble with Principle

"[Fish] offers the edifying and cheering spectacle of a brilliant scholar strolling into the midst of academic disciplines other than the one he was trained in, joining in the highly professionalized games being played, and winning...In The Trouble with Principle, his latest collection of papers, Fish deploys a master argument that goes like this: The trouble with principles is that they are either so abstract and contentless that all the work is done filling in the details, or else sufficiently concrete as to be very controversial indeed." - Richard Rorty, New Leader "Sports, film, TV and radio, politics and journalism - Fish is fluent wherever he goes...His rhetorical style is surgically precise, and in The Trouble with Principle it is his best friends who are put under the knife - liberals comfortable with beliefs whose rightness they take for granted...In the art of argument, he is formidably skilled...He will unravel your every position, reducing it to words of reversible meanings." - Michael Skube, Atlanta Journal Constitution"