Podcast appearances and mentions of Stanley Fish

Is genuine originality a realistic goal for artists?From fashion to fantasy, entertainment to enterprise, we seek the 'new' as the means to originality, change, and creativity. And for the most part, we imagine the new is always identifiable as a radical break from the past. But the nature of the new is more elusive and unknown than it first appears. Is the new an illusion, and the search for originality a mistake? Should creative endeavour be focussed on other goals, such as the timeless, the provocative, and the beautiful? Or is the new an essential part of life, creativity and action, without which we would have mere passive re-orderings of the known?Martin Puchner is a literary critic and philosopher. He is the Byron and Anita Wien Chair of Drama and of English and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. Claire Hynes is Associate Professor in Literature & Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, and an author of fiction and creative non-fiction. Stanley Fish is a literary critic, legal scholar, and public intellectual. Renowned for his role in developing reader-response theory in literary studies, Fish has written on a wide range of topics including the poetry of John Milton, the distinction between free speech and academic freedom, and the doctrine of liberalism. And don't hesitate to email us at podcast@iai.tv with your thoughts or questions on the episode!To witness such debates live buy tickets for our upcoming festival: https://howthelightgetsin.org/festivals/And visit our website for many more articles, videos, and podcasts like this one: https://iai.tv/You can find everything we referenced here: https://linktr.ee/philosophyforourtimesSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Frank talks about the disappearance of people taking home leftovers from restaurants. He then talks with Dr. Stanley Fish, an esteemed law professor at Florida International University and the author of the book “Law at the Movies: Turning Legal Doctrine into Art". They talk about the intersection of law and cinema. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Frank starts the show talking with space expert and radio host Steve Kates a.k.a. Dr. Sky. They discuss the Boeing Starliner astronauts returning back to Earth, the latest on the Blue Ghost lunar lander, Saturn's newly discovered moons and much more. Frank talks about the disappearance of people taking home leftovers from restaurants. He then talks with Dr. Stanley Fish, an esteemed law professor at Florida International University and the author of the book “Law at the Movies: Turning Legal Doctrine into Art". They talk about the intersection of law and cinema. Frank starts the third hour asking if chess is a sport. He moves on to talk about why married men are more likely to be obese and later announces this week's listener of the week. Frank wraps up the show discussing studies that are showing that people are getting dumber because of their reliance on technology. He also covers the latest between Russia and Ukraine as Trump and Putin continue discussions on a potential ceasefire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Dr. Stanley Fish, esteemed law professor at Florida International University and the author of the book “Law at the Movies: Turning Legal Doctrine into Art" Topic: the intersection of law and cinema Bio: https://law.fiu.edu/directory/stanley-fish/ Book: https://www.amazon.com/Law-Movies-Turning-Doctrine-Literature-ebook/dp/B0CVNJ12ZW Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

We kicked off the program with four news stories and different guests on the stories we think you need to know about!Successful Fundraiser on Saturday for the Mary Ann Brett Food Pantry! Jim Brett checked in with Dan to review the event.Essex County Trail Association's Tails for the Trails - 5k Casual Canicross Coming up on March 29th! Martha Sanders – Chair of the Board of Directors for the Essex County Trail Association joined Dan.Law at the Movies: Turning Legal Doctrine into Art - the understanding of law, cinema, and the intricate interplay between the two! With Dr. Stanley Fish – author of “Law at the Movies”.Survey: Nearly 90% of Americans believe tipping is getting out of hand today! Scott Baradell - Branding & Consumer Trends Expert with Idea Grove gets at the tip of the iceberg.Listen to WBZ NewsRadio on the NEW iHeart Radio app and be sure to set WBZ NewsRadio as your #1 preset!

Stanley Fish joins our hosts to discuss "Impossible Things," his recent essay for the magazine, in which he catologues the latest attempts in a perennial project to clean up human behavior, from blind submission to critical legal studies to artificial intelligence. Professor Fish is the presidential scholar in residence at New College, Florida, and the author of many books, most recently, Law at the Movies: Turning Legal Doctrine into Art, which is available for purchase here.

Have you ever wondered what the Supreme Court, Stanley Fish, the Bible, Naomi Wolf, Barbara Boyd, the Gospel of Jesus Christ, AND Human Communication Theory have in common?Of course you have! That is what Pastor Frank unpacks, discerns, and understands in this special one-night Wednesday class at Redemption Church Arcadia.

The SKATCAST Network presents:The SKATCAST Show #96Today's Bullshizz:[ Liam the Monster Hunter | :47 ] - "Cutest Lil' Owl In Marnia" - Liam learns a number of lessons as the wizard struggles with remembering who he used to be.[ Buckcherry Jones and the Riverdance Kid | 10:53 ] - "Train Robbery" - The Fuckleberg Five plan to take out a train to make some cash. The planning is not perfect.[ Talking Pets | 16:57 ] - "Stanley Fish" - Taken from yesterday's Inside Scooper (#79), the Droknol shares his favorite past-time of all, and after being punished for it, he and the gang try and help Beans and Frank with their issues. This is the sad story of Stanley Fish.[ Post Apocalyptica | 22:28 ] - "Save the Cards" - Dave and Angus were searching a random house in the Zombie Apocalypse, Angus set it on fire, things got dangerous and Steve went missing. Angus finds something much more interesting to him though.Thank you for listening! Have the Friday-est of Tuesdays!Visit us for more episodes of SKATCAST and other shows like SKATCAST presents The Dave & Angus Show plus BONUS material at https://www.skatcast.com Watch select shows and shorts on YouTube: bit.ly/34kxCneJoin the conversation on Discord! https://discord.gg/mVFf2brAaFFor all show related questions: info@skatcast.comPlease rate and subscribe on iTunes and elsewhere and follow SKATCAST on social media!! Instagram: @theescriptkeeper Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/scriptkeepersATWanna become a Patron? Click here: https://www.patreon.com/SkatcastSign up through Patreon and you'll get Exclusive Content, Behind The Scenes video, special downloads and more! Prefer to make a donation instead? You can do that through our PayPal: https://paypal.me/skatcastpodcast Get bonus content on Patreon Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

I'm reading a book by Stanley Fish called How to Write a Sentence. I found this book by Googling that exact question because I wanted to find anything that might be a fit for what I'm podcasting about this season. How to Write a Sentence by Stanley Fish The Tools and Materials of Writing Write While True Episode 28: Complex Sentences Jabberwocky by Lewis Carroll Sponsor: Prompted Morning Page Journals Transcript

In this episode, Steve and I discuss the novel and the film adaptations of "True Grit"--their similarities and differences, and how the Coen version fits their vision of life in a cold, indifferent universe. We mention this article about the film by Stanley Fish, and the book by Adam Nayman, The Coen Brothers: This Book Really Ties the Films Together.

An intermediate episode. It seems wrong to talk about Foucault without mentioning his theory of power and societal change. But I don't think there's a lot you can *do* with that theory in the sense of "applying it to software". So it doesn't really fit with the podcast theme. But his is a disturbing theory for the problem-solvers among us, so I make it more palatable by comparing it to a cult horror movie from 1997.SourcesMichel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000 Vincenzo Natali, script for the movie "Cube", 6th draftPeter Linebaugh, The London Hanged: Crime and Civil Society in the Eighteenth Century. The chapter I cite is “Ships and Chips: Technological Repression and the Origin of the Wage”Other mentionsOn large language models and "a judicious amount of randomness", Stephen Wolfram's "What Is ChatGPT Doing … and Why Does It Work?" is good. Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning, 2016George Lakoff, Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind, 1987Gregory L. Murphy, The Big Book of Concepts, 2002The Eastern State Penitentiary was a model prison that featured solitary confinement, a Bible as the only possession, and piecework in the cell. It was the founding institution of what came to be called "The Pennsylvania System." See also  "Eastern State Penitentiary: A Prison With a Past".I mention an idea I got from Richard Rorty and Stanley Fish. I don't exactly remember the sources. For Rorty, it was probably Contingency, Irony, and Solidarity. For Fish, it might have been Is There a Text in This Class?Image creditThe image is the Albion flour mill, completed in 1786, which was possibly the referent of Blake's "dark satanic mills" in his poem Jerusalem: And did the Countenance Divine, Shine forth upon our clouded hills? And was Jerusalem builded here, Among these dark Satanic Mills?

Should the origins of ideas matter as much as their substance? Our experts discuss.Looking for a link we mentioned? It's here: https://linktr.ee/philosophyforourtimesThere has always been dispute over which ideas are most significant. But at least there used to be broad agreement about the hallmarks of quality and the great works in each field. Now, from literature to the social sciences, there are claims that previous standards were structures of prejudice and oppression, and calls are heard for greater inclusion.How do we navigate this new space where there is so little agreement on merit? Should we abandon the notion of 'great works' altogether, or would this threaten the very survival of our culture and much that we hold to be valuable?Literary theorist Stanley Fish, author of How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff, journalist and editor of MsAfropolitan, Minna Salami and writer and essayist Janne Teller rethink what makes a great work of art. Hosted by BBC Parliamentary Correspondent, Sean Curran.There are thousands of big ideas to discover at IAI.tv – videos, articles, and courses waiting for you to explore. Find out more: https://iai.tv/podcast-offers?utm_source=podcast&utm_medium=shownotes&utm_campaign=popularity-and-prejudiceSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Clio asks how endings work in Taylor Swift's "New Year's Day" with help from Frank Kermode's The Sense of an Ending: Studies in the Theory of Fiction and Stanley Fish's Surprised by Sin: The Reader in Paradise Lost.Get in touch with comments, questions, or just to say hi at studiesintaylorswift@gmail.com.Music: "Happy Strummin" by Audionautix. Cover art by Finley Doyle. See more of Finley's work at https://tangelofin.wordpress.com/. 

The 2021 National Lawyers Convention took place November 11-13, 2021 at the Mayflower Hotel in Washington, DC. The topic of the conference was "Public and Private Power: Preserving Freedom or Preventing Harm?". This panel asked "Is Anyone Still Committed to Free Speech?".The Supreme Court in 1964 spoke of "a profound national commitment to the principle that debate on public issues should be uninhibited, robust, and wide-open." That commitment has seemingly waned of late. Conservatives bemoan a new institutional "cancel culture" that chills heterodox views, with many now questioning limits on government’s ability to regulate the speech and associations of private parties like social-media platforms, corporations, and employers. Meanwhile, progressives complain that speech rights are, as one ACLU attorney put it, "more often a tool of the powerful than the oppressed" and should be subordinated to other values like equity, safety from harmful speech, and "anti-racism." Has something truly changed in recent years, and, if so, does it matter? Is the traditional view of free speech—freedom from government regulation—worth defending?Featuring:Mr. Mike Davis, President and Founder, Internet Accountability Project; Former Chief Counsel for Nominations to Senate Judiciary Chairman Chuck Grassley; Founder, The Article III ProjectProf. Stanley Fish, Professor of Law, Florida International University College of Law; Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law, Cardozo LawProf. Joel Gora, Professor of Law, Brooklyn Law SchoolMs. Nicole Neily, President and Founder, Parents Defending EducationModerator: Hon. David R. Stras, U.S. Court of Appeals, Eight Circuit

In this episode, Conference Director Matthew Biberman concludes his discussion with Stanley Fish. Fish's analysis of first amendment law and matters of free speech has had a sustained influence on American culture and legal practice. Fish talks about his recent books The First, and How to Write a Sentence, as well as reminiscing about Hugh Kenner, Fredric Jameson, Arnold Stein, and David Lodge among others. For fans of Milton, legal theory, and cultural studies.

In this episode Conference Director Matthew Biberman talks with Stanley Fish. First rising to prominence as the Milton scholar who unknowingly inaugurated that branch of literary theory later dubbed "reader-response criticism," Fish then spearheaded a critique of liberalism, transforming him into a key early proponent of CLS (critical legal studies). Fish's analysis of first amendment law and matters of free speech has had a sustained influence on American culture and legal practice, with the rise of "critical race studies" being but one indirect result of these pathbreaking interventions.

This week, we're joined by Ben Winters (Golden State, The Quiet Boy) to discuss a Stanley Fish book about how to write great sentences. We talk about our love-hate relationships with craft books, why our first drafts are such a mess, and the false dichotomy of "language" vs "plot" when attempting to categorize writers. We also chat with Ben about his unusual writing career, which began with being hired to write the novel Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters for Quirk Books. You can find out more about Ben on his website: https://benhwinters.com/ If you like our podcast, and would like to get more of it, check out our Patreon, where $5 gets you two bonus episodes a month: https://www.patreon.com/BookFight  

How does the First Amendment really work? Why is it important to understand the difference between free speech and free action? What role, if any, should social media companies like Twitter or Facebook play in policing the online speech?Stanley Fish is a literary theorist, legal scholar, and New York Times best-selling author. He is also a professor of law at Florida International University and a visiting professor of law at the Cardozo School of Law. He explores all of these questions in his most recent book, The First: How To Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, And Donald Trump.In this episode, we'll hear more about The First Amendment, what it does and doesn't protect and what kind of speech it regulates. We'll also discuss some of the contradictions of free speech in 21st-century society. Plus, Stanley's argument for why academia should always remain “an ivory tower.”Episode Quotes:On free speech protections in private life:“We produce and listen to and consume speech, but the First Amendment, in general, has nothing whatsoever to say about that large swath of human life in which speech is being produced. And many people believe that the legal, constitutional prohibitions against abridging free speech carry over into the sphere of private life, but they do not.”On the diminishing public attention span:“The large amount of interaction between ideas in the public takes place in the instant[...] the point is simply to make your point as vigorously as possible, and then get out of the way and go on to the next point. [It's] the very opposite of inviting considered reflection and deliberation.”On academia as an “ivory tower”:“The arguments against the academy being an ivory tower are wrong. The academy is and should be an ivory tower. And when it ceases to be, it loses its distinctiveness, the distinctiveness of the task that it can perform, and therefore the distinctiveness of the value or service it can provide in the society. If universities are just political agents with classrooms, let's get rid of the classrooms and go right to it.”Show Links:Stanley Fish Faculty ProfileThe First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump

------------------Support the channel------------ Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/thedissenter PayPal: paypal.me/thedissenter PayPal Subscription 1 Dollar: https://tinyurl.com/yb3acuuy PayPal Subscription 3 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ybn6bg9l PayPal Subscription 5 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/ycmr9gpz PayPal Subscription 10 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y9r3fc9m PayPal Subscription 20 Dollars: https://tinyurl.com/y95uvkao This show is sponsored by Enlites, Learning & Development done differently. Check the website here: http://enlites.com/ Dr. Stanley Fish is Professor of Law at Florida International University and Visiting Professor of Law at Cardoso Law School. In addition to being one of the country's leading public intellectuals, Professor Fish is an extraordinarily prolific author. Professor Dr. Fish has written for many of the country's leading law journals. including Stanford Law Review, Duke Law Journal, Yale Law Journal, University of Chicago Law Review, Columbia Law Review, and Texas Law Review. His books include There's No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too (1994); and The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump (2019). In this episode, we focus on free speech. Dr. Fish presents his thesis against the idea that free speech exists, and we discuss its details. We start with a bit of Dr. Fish's background and where his interest in free speech comes from, and also a definition of free speech. We talk about John Stuart Mill's position, and the history of the political struggle for free speech. We discuss freedom of speech in the context of academia and the media. We ask if it makes sense to distinguish speech from action, and also address the distinction between freedom of speech and freedom of inquiry. Toward the end, Dr. Fish explains why he thinks “philosophy does not matter”. -- A HUGE THANK YOU TO MY PATRONS/SUPPORTERS: KARIN LIETZCKE, ANN BLANCHETTE, PER HELGE LARSEN, LAU GUERREIRO, JERRY MULLER, HANS FREDRIK SUNDE, BERNARDO SEIXAS, HERBERT GINTIS, RUTGER VOS, RICARDO VLADIMIRO, BO WINEGARD, CRAIG HEALY, OLAF ALEX, PHILIP KURIAN, JONATHAN VISSER, ANJAN KATTA, JAKOB KLINKBY, ADAM KESSEL, MATTHEW WHITINGBIRD, ARNAUD WOLFF, TIM HOLLOSY, HENRIK AHLENIUS, JOHN CONNORS, PAULINA BARREN, FILIP FORS CONNOLLY, DAN DEMETRIOU, ROBERT WINDHAGER, RUI INACIO, ARTHUR KOH, ZOOP, MARCO NEVES, MAX BEILBY, COLIN HOLBROOK, SUSAN PINKER, THOMAS TRUMBLE, PABLO SANTURBANO, SIMON COLUMBUS, PHIL KAVANAGH, JORGE ESPINHA, CORY CLARK, MARK BLYTH, ROBERTO INGUANZO, MIKKEL STORMYR, ERIC NEURMANN, SAMUEL ANDREEFF, FRANCIS FORDE, TIAGO NUNES, BERNARD HUGUENEY, ALEXANDER DANNBAUER, OMARI HICKSON, PHYLICIA STEVENS, FERGAL CUSSEN, YEVHEN BODRENKO, HAL HERZOG, NUNO MACHADO, DON ROSS, JOÃO ALVES DA SILVA, JONATHAN LEIBRANT, JOÃO LINHARES, OZLEM BULUT, NATHAN NGUYEN, STANTON T, SAMUEL CORREA, ERIK HAINES, MARK SMITH, J.W., JOÃO EIRA, TOM HUMMEL, SARDUS FRANCE, DAVID SLOAN WILSON, YACILA DEZA-ARAUJO, IDAN SOLON, ROMAIN ROCH, DMITRY GRIGORYEV, TOM ROTH, DIEGO LONDOÑO CORREA, YANICK PUNTER, ADANER USMANI, CHARLOTTE BLEASE, MIRAN B, NICOLE BARBARO, AND ADAM HUNT! A SPECIAL THANKS TO MY PRODUCERS, YZAR WEHBE, JIM FRANK, ŁUKASZ STAFINIAK, IAN GILLIGAN, SERGIU CODREANU, LUIS CAYETANO, TOM VANEGDOM, CURTIS DIXON, BENEDIKT MUELLER, VEGA GIDEY, AND NIRUBAN BALACHANDRAN! AND TO MY EXECUTIVE PRODUCERS, MICHAL RUSIECKI, ROSEY, JAMES PRATT, AND MATTHEW LAVENDER!

DOCUMENTATION AND ADDITIONAL READING PART 1 (0:0 - 11:27): ────────────────── The Explosion in Beirut and the Enduring Agony of Lebanon NEW YORK TIMES (REUTERS) Beirut Residents Mourn Destruction Amid Transformed Cityscape PART 2 (11:28 - 19:40): ────────────────── A Very Troubling Pattern, Part One: Retreat on Religious Liberty ASSOCIATED PRESS (ELANA SCHOR AND HANNAH FINGERHUT) Religious freedom in America: popular and polarizing PART 3 (19:41 - 26:25): ────────────────── A Very Troubling Pattern, Part Two: Undermining Free Speech TABLET (BLAKE SMITH) Stanley Fish and the Argument Against Free Speech

In this episode, Stanley Fish, Professor of Law at Florida International University College of Law and Floersheimer Distinguished Visiting Professor of Law at Yeshiva University Benjamin N. Cardozo School of Law, discusses his new book "The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump," which is published by Simon & Schuster. Fish begins by explaining why the concept of free speech presents such an intractable political problem. He reflects on how that problem plays out in relation to different particular issues, including hate speech and campus speech. He explains why religious speech presents uniquely difficult problems. And he closes by discussing how we should think about information and truth. Fish is on Twitter at @stanleyfish.This episode was hosted by Brian L. Frye, Spears-Gilbert Professor of Law at the University of Kentucky College of Law. Frye is on Twitter at @brianlfrye. See acast.com/privacy for privacy and opt-out information.

The answer to the question is ‘yes' as long as you understand the limitations of the doctrine of free speech and how its elasticity applies in the case of issues like campus speech, hate speech and fake news. Our guest, Stanley Fish, one of the great public thinkers on the American stage today was dis … Continue reading EP 350 Can the First Amendment Withstand Many Pressures in Today's America?

Welcome to Occult of Personality: esoteric podcast extraordinaire. I’m your host, Greg Kaminsky.This is episode number 202, featuring an outstanding interview with Michael Martin about the revised version of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and much more!Occult of Personality podcast is made possible by you, the listeners, and by the subscribers to https://chamberofreflection.com, our membership site. This episode is also sponsored by several listeners who made generous donations to aid us and the cause of informed, authentic, and accessible interviews about western esotericism. Thank you again Martin, Andrew, David, and Judith! Because of your donations and the support of the subscribers to the Chamber of Reflection, we’re able to bring you interviews of this caliber and more to come.Now, in episode #202, Michael Martin joins us to discuss this recent version of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz which features two of his essays that recontextualize and add a much greater depth of meaning to the story. To put it briefly, my interpretation of Martin’s assertion is that the actual intention of the text was to allow readers to see through the attachments to pride, recognition, and knowledge, whether esoteric or mundane and gather themselves around a simpler spirituality that endeavors to see and understand the vast mystery of reality beyond any classification or even languaging.“The story is full of jokes, puzzles, satires, and red herrings—mostly at the expense of academic pride and the pretentions of occultists. Adding to the humor of The Chymical Wedding, most of the commentary written over the last five hundred years in hopes of probing its secrets has been of exactly the sort Andreae was pranking in the first place—which is why he described the book’s reception as “a game which was evaluated and foolishly explicated with subtle ingenuity and which proves the stupidity of the curios.” Indeed, some people don’t know a good joke when it’s played on them.“It is my contention that the playful construction of The Chymical Wedding is evidence of Andreae’s intention to apply physic to the soul of the reader. The text, that is, serves as what Stanley Fish (one of the great readers of seventeenth-century literature before he turned to law and the life of a public intellectual) has called “a self-consuming artifact,” which, as he further explains, “signifies most successfully when it fails, when it points away from itself to something its forms cannot capture. If this is not anti-art, it is surely anti-art-for-art’s sake because it is concerned less with the making of better poems than with the making of better persons.” As a self-consuming artifact, The Chymical Wedding—reveling in the high comedy of intellectual hubris, revealing its own “mysteries” despite its occult paraphernalia, and ever again reminding the reader to not rely on learning or the discovery of the secrets of nature as surrogates for salvation—tries to enact a transformation on the soul of the reader by destabilizing the reader’s preconceptions of what a “chemical wedding” is—or, for that matter, what a “Rosicrucian” is. The Chymical Wedding succeeds when it fails (the sham “lost ending” certainly supports this supposition) because if it had succeeded as an occult text it would have surely failed as physic for the soul. Herein lies the brilliance of Andreae’s ludibrium. That so many have missed what is so obvious only proves his point the more.” – Michael Martin, Introduction: “So unlooked for an adventure,” The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, The Ezekiel Foxcroft Translation, revised, and with two new essays by Michael Martin, 2019I think Martin’s work here is crucial and I am really thrilled to be able to talk to him about it and share that conversation with you! Although I wish I’d encountered Martin years ago when I first became interested in Rosicrucianism, but it seems fitting that it has taken until now. I would dare to say that his analysis is worth your time and consideration. It may even bring about new insights and different ways of appreciating western magick and esotericism. Related to Rosicrucianism, Michael also talks about Sophiology, a radical way of seeing and feeling the world as the deepest mystery of reality. A form of western nonduality if you will. Our conversation here only touches the tip of the iceberg of scholarship and mysticism that lay beneath… Michael Martin, Ph.D. is a philosopher, poet, musician, songwriter, editor, and biodynamic farmer. He spent sixteen years as a Waldorf teacher and Master Teacher and taught at the university and college level for over seventeen years. He began biodynamic farming in 1990 and currently raises dairy goats, bees, and other animals while managing a market garden with his wife and some of his nine children. His poetry and scholarship have appeared in many journals and he is the editor of Jesus the Imagination: A Journal of Spiritual Revolution. The intro music is “Awakening” by Paul Avgerinos (http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/avgerinos-gnosis?song=3) and the outro music is “Wild Rose” by Barry Sulkin (https://magnatune.com/artists/albums/barrysulkin-isleofelba?song=11) In the Chamber of Reflection, author Allen Blackwell joins me to discuss his magical book of short stories, 26 Gates! Listen to that exclusive recording at https://chamberofreflection.com or at our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/occultofpersonality. I’d like to remind you that although you’re able to listen to this podcast at no charge, it costs time and money to create. We ask you to support our efforts and the creation of future podcasts by joining the membership section at https://chamberofreflection.com or subscribing via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/occultofpersonality. And if you’re already supporting the show or have done so in the past – my heartfelt thanks and I salute you! Thanks for listening and until next time . . . https://www.thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com/https://www.amazon.com/Chymical-Wedding-Christian-Rosenkreutz-translation/dp/1621384772https://www.thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com/post/the-rose-and-the-cross-or-how-to-be-a-rosicrucianhttps://www.amazon.com/Submerged-Reality-Sophiology-Poetic-Metaphysics/dp/1621381137https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Martin/e/B00KHCTX04/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1

Welcome to Occult of Personality: esoteric podcast extraordinaire. I’m your host, Greg Kaminsky. This is episode number 202, featuring an outstanding interview with Michael Martin about the revised version of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz and much more! Occult of Personality podcast is made possible by you, the listeners, and by the subscribers to https://chamberofreflection.com, our membership site. This episode is also sponsored by several listeners who made generous donations to aid us and the cause of informed, authentic, and accessible interviews about western esotericism. Thank you again Martin, Andrew, David, and Judith! Because of your donations and the support of the subscribers to the Chamber of Reflection, we’re able to bring you interviews of this caliber and more to come. Now, in episode #202, Michael Martin joins us to discuss this recent version of The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz which features two of his essays that recontextualize and add a much greater depth of meaning to the story. To put it briefly, my interpretation of Martin’s assertion is that the actual intention of the text was to allow readers to see through the attachments to pride, recognition, and knowledge, whether esoteric or mundane and gather themselves around a simpler spirituality that endeavors to see and understand the vast mystery of reality beyond any classification or even languaging. “The story is full of jokes, puzzles, satires, and red herrings—mostly at the expense of academic pride and the pretentions of occultists. Adding to the humor of The Chymical Wedding, most of the commentary written over the last five hundred years in hopes of probing its secrets has been of exactly the sort Andreae was pranking in the first place—which is why he described the book’s reception as “a game which was evaluated and foolishly explicated with subtle ingenuity and which proves the stupidity of the curios.” Indeed, some people don’t know a good joke when it’s played on them. “It is my contention that the playful construction of The Chymical Wedding is evidence of Andreae’s intention to apply physic to the soul of the reader. The text, that is, serves as what Stanley Fish (one of the great readers of seventeenth-century literature before he turned to law and the life of a public intellectual) has called “a self-consuming artifact,” which, as he further explains, “signifies most successfully when it fails, when it points away from itself to something its forms cannot capture. If this is not anti-art, it is surely anti-art-for-art’s sake because it is concerned less with the making of better poems than with the making of better persons.” As a self-consuming artifact, The Chymical Wedding—reveling in the high comedy of intellectual hubris, revealing its own “mysteries” despite its occult paraphernalia, and ever again reminding the reader to not rely on learning or the discovery of the secrets of nature as surrogates for salvation—tries to enact a transformation on the soul of the reader by destabilizing the reader’s preconceptions of what a “chemical wedding” is—or, for that matter, what a “Rosicrucian” is. The Chymical Wedding succeeds when it fails (the sham “lost ending” certainly supports this supposition) because if it had succeeded as an occult text it would have surely failed as physic for the soul. Herein lies the brilliance of Andreae’s ludibrium. That so many have missed what is so obvious only proves his point the more.” – Michael Martin, Introduction: “So unlooked for an adventure,” The Chymical Wedding of Christian Rosenkreutz, The Ezekiel Foxcroft Translation, revised, and with two new essays by Michael Martin, 2019 I think Martin’s work here is crucial and I am really thrilled to be able to talk to him about it and share that conversation with you! Although I wish I’d encountered Martin years ago when I first became interested in Rosicrucianism, but it seems fitting that it has taken until now. I would dare to say that his analysis is worth your time and consideration. It may even bring about new insights and different ways of appreciating western magick and esotericism. Related to Rosicrucianism, Michael also talks about Sophiology, a radical way of seeing and feeling the world as the deepest mystery of reality. A form of western nonduality if you will. Our conversation here only touches the tip of the iceberg of scholarship and mysticism that lay beneath… Michael Martin, Ph.D. is a philosopher, poet, musician, songwriter, editor, and biodynamic farmer. He spent sixteen years as a Waldorf teacher and Master Teacher and taught at the university and college level for over seventeen years. He began biodynamic farming in 1990 and currently raises dairy goats, bees, and other animals while managing a market garden with his wife and some of his nine children. His poetry and scholarship have appeared in many journals and he is the editor of Jesus the Imagination: A Journal of Spiritual Revolution. The intro music is “Awakening” by Paul Avgerinos (http://magnatune.com/artists/albums/avgerinos-gnosis?song=3) and the outro music is “Wild Rose” by Barry Sulkin (https://magnatune.com/artists/albums/barrysulkin-isleofelba?song=11) In the Chamber of Reflection, author Allen Blackwell joins me to discuss his magical book of short stories, 26 Gates! Listen to that exclusive recording at https://chamberofreflection.com or at our Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/occultofpersonality. I’d like to remind you that although you’re able to listen to this podcast at no charge, it costs time and money to create. We ask you to support our efforts and the creation of future podcasts by joining the membership section at https://chamberofreflection.com or subscribing via Patreon at https://www.patreon.com/occultofpersonality. And if you’re already supporting the show or have done so in the past – my heartfelt thanks and I salute you! Thanks for listening and until next time . . . https://www.thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com/ https://www.amazon.com/Chymical-Wedding-Christian-Rosenkreutz-translation/dp/1621384772 https://www.thecenterforsophiologicalstudies.com/post/the-rose-and-the-cross-or-how-to-be-a-rosicrucian https://www.amazon.com/Submerged-Reality-Sophiology-Poetic-Metaphysics/dp/1621381137 https://www.amazon.com/Michael-Martin/e/B00KHCTX04/ref=dp_byline_cont_book_1

Free speech is often touted as a guiding principle of American civic life, but is this truly the case? What is guaranteed under the first amendment to the constitution? On this episode, Prof. Stanley Fish discussed his book, The First.

Stanley Fish, best-selling author and octogenarian, clues us into the intricacies of arguments: how argument is a more natural state; destructive arguments; how to get out of one; and much more! Grateful to be able to connect with such a distinguished author and professor as Dr. Fish!

On this episode, Stanley Fish discusses his recent book, “The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump.”

Stanley Fish is a well-known scholar regarding the First Amendment and free speech. In his latest book, The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-truth, and Donald Trump (One Signal, 2019), Professor Fish discusses the popular and legal meanings of the First Amendment's speech and religion clauses. He argues that speech is not an apolitical concept, but is in fact often invoked for political purposes. Although he favors a robust zone of free speech, he is careful to note what speech law does and should protect versus what it does not, or should not, protect. He makes distinctions between freedom of inquiry in an academic setting and the claims of absolutists regarding free speech on campuses. He is also concerned with what he considers the “poor fit” of the modern interpretation of the religion clauses (Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses) with the Constitution's concerns with individual liberty. In addition to the Constitution, Professor Fish discusses the roles of sunshine laws, post-modern interpretations of speech, and the political speech phenomenon of Donald Trump. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stanley Fish is a well-known scholar regarding the First Amendment and free speech. In his latest book, The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-truth, and Donald Trump (One Signal, 2019), Professor Fish discusses the popular and legal meanings of the First Amendment’s speech and religion clauses. He argues that speech is not an apolitical concept, but is in fact often invoked for political purposes. Although he favors a robust zone of free speech, he is careful to note what speech law does and should protect versus what it does not, or should not, protect. He makes distinctions between freedom of inquiry in an academic setting and the claims of absolutists regarding free speech on campuses. He is also concerned with what he considers the “poor fit” of the modern interpretation of the religion clauses (Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses) with the Constitution’s concerns with individual liberty. In addition to the Constitution, Professor Fish discusses the roles of sunshine laws, post-modern interpretations of speech, and the political speech phenomenon of Donald Trump. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stanley Fish is a well-known scholar regarding the First Amendment and free speech. In his latest book, The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-truth, and Donald Trump (One Signal, 2019), Professor Fish discusses the popular and legal meanings of the First Amendment’s speech and religion clauses. He argues that speech is not an apolitical concept, but is in fact often invoked for political purposes. Although he favors a robust zone of free speech, he is careful to note what speech law does and should protect versus what it does not, or should not, protect. He makes distinctions between freedom of inquiry in an academic setting and the claims of absolutists regarding free speech on campuses. He is also concerned with what he considers the “poor fit” of the modern interpretation of the religion clauses (Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses) with the Constitution’s concerns with individual liberty. In addition to the Constitution, Professor Fish discusses the roles of sunshine laws, post-modern interpretations of speech, and the political speech phenomenon of Donald Trump. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stanley Fish is a well-known scholar regarding the First Amendment and free speech. In his latest book, The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-truth, and Donald Trump (One Signal, 2019), Professor Fish discusses the popular and legal meanings of the First Amendment’s speech and religion clauses. He argues that speech is not an apolitical concept, but is in fact often invoked for political purposes. Although he favors a robust zone of free speech, he is careful to note what speech law does and should protect versus what it does not, or should not, protect. He makes distinctions between freedom of inquiry in an academic setting and the claims of absolutists regarding free speech on campuses. He is also concerned with what he considers the “poor fit” of the modern interpretation of the religion clauses (Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses) with the Constitution’s concerns with individual liberty. In addition to the Constitution, Professor Fish discusses the roles of sunshine laws, post-modern interpretations of speech, and the political speech phenomenon of Donald Trump. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stanley Fish is a well-known scholar regarding the First Amendment and free speech. In his latest book, The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-truth, and Donald Trump (One Signal, 2019), Professor Fish discusses the popular and legal meanings of the First Amendment’s speech and religion clauses. He argues that speech is not an apolitical concept, but is in fact often invoked for political purposes. Although he favors a robust zone of free speech, he is careful to note what speech law does and should protect versus what it does not, or should not, protect. He makes distinctions between freedom of inquiry in an academic setting and the claims of absolutists regarding free speech on campuses. He is also concerned with what he considers the “poor fit” of the modern interpretation of the religion clauses (Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses) with the Constitution’s concerns with individual liberty. In addition to the Constitution, Professor Fish discusses the roles of sunshine laws, post-modern interpretations of speech, and the political speech phenomenon of Donald Trump. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stanley Fish is a well-known scholar regarding the First Amendment and free speech. In his latest book, The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-truth, and Donald Trump (One Signal, 2019), Professor Fish discusses the popular and legal meanings of the First Amendment’s speech and religion clauses. He argues that speech is not an apolitical concept, but is in fact often invoked for political purposes. Although he favors a robust zone of free speech, he is careful to note what speech law does and should protect versus what it does not, or should not, protect. He makes distinctions between freedom of inquiry in an academic setting and the claims of absolutists regarding free speech on campuses. He is also concerned with what he considers the “poor fit” of the modern interpretation of the religion clauses (Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses) with the Constitution’s concerns with individual liberty. In addition to the Constitution, Professor Fish discusses the roles of sunshine laws, post-modern interpretations of speech, and the political speech phenomenon of Donald Trump. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Stanley Fish is a well-known scholar regarding the First Amendment and free speech. In his latest book, The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-truth, and Donald Trump (One Signal, 2019), Professor Fish discusses the popular and legal meanings of the First Amendment’s speech and religion clauses. He argues that speech is not an apolitical concept, but is in fact often invoked for political purposes. Although he favors a robust zone of free speech, he is careful to note what speech law does and should protect versus what it does not, or should not, protect. He makes distinctions between freedom of inquiry in an academic setting and the claims of absolutists regarding free speech on campuses. He is also concerned with what he considers the “poor fit” of the modern interpretation of the religion clauses (Free Exercise and Establishment Clauses) with the Constitution’s concerns with individual liberty. In addition to the Constitution, Professor Fish discusses the roles of sunshine laws, post-modern interpretations of speech, and the political speech phenomenon of Donald Trump. Ian J. Drake is an Associate Professor of Political Science and Law at Montclair State University. His scholarly interests include American legal and constitutional history and political theory. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Should academia be political? Does social-justice have a place on Campus? Does anti-foundationalism imply a particular view of these culture war issues? Stanley Fish and I discuss.

Is free speech a coherent idea? is there a neutral standard to decide if something is hate speech? How should we conceptualize liberalism, and how should we argue for it in the age of Trump? Support the podcast on Patreon: https://www.patreon.com/PoliticalPhilosophyPodcast Buy The First https://www.amazon.com/First-Speech-Campus-Religious-Post-Truth/dp/1982115246

110619 Stanley Fish by Marc Bernier

Does free speech exist?  According to Cardozo Law Professor Stanley Fish, it does not. On today’s episode of So to Speak: The Free Speech Podcast, we dig into what the colorful professor means by this assertion and discuss his forthcoming book, “The First: How to Think About Hate Speech, Campus Speech, Religious Speech, Fake News, Post-Truth, and Donald Trump.” Show notes: Podcast transcript “There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech: And It’s a Good Thing, Too” by Stanley Fish “Areopagitica” by John Milton “Leviathan” by Thomas Hobbes New York Times v. Sullivan (1964) “Absence of Malice” (1981) movie “Inherit the Wind” (1960) movie “The Structure of Scientific Revolutions” by Thomas S. Kuhn “In defense of the NBA: The league has every right to come down hard on critics of China who work for it” by Stanley Fish www.sotospeakpodcast.com Follow us on Twitter: https://www.twitter.com/freespeechtalk Like us on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/sotospeakpodcast Email us: sotospeak@thefire.org

ABOUT THIS EPISODE Given the ultimate purposes of colleges, universities, and academic disciplines, is viewpoint diversity (such as recruiting more conservatives into the social sciences) essential to achieving those purposes? What about free speech? Are trigger warnings an impediment to achieving those purposes? In this episode, I discuss these issues with two publicly engaged scholars: Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist and a faculty member at the New York University Stern School of Business, as well as Aaron Hanlon, an assistant professor of English at Colby College who also teaches in and serves on the Advisory Committee for the college's program in Science, Technology, and Society. LINKS --Jonathan Haidt's NYU webpage (https://www.stern.nyu.edu/faculty/bio/jonathan-haidt) --Aaron Hanlon's Colby College webpage (https://www.colby.edu/directory/profile/aaron.hanlon/) --The Heterodox Academy (https://heterodoxacademy.org/) --"The Coddling of the American Mind," (by Greg Lukianoff and Jonathan Haidt, in The Atlantic) (https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/09/the-coddling-of-the-american-mind/399356/) --"The Trigger Warning Myth," (by Aaron Hanlon, in The New Republic) (https://newrepublic.com/article/122543/trigger-warning-myth) --"On Balance," (by Stanley Fish, in The Chronicle of Higher Education) (https://www.chronicle.com/article/On-Balance/44890) --"Free Speech is not an Academic Value" (by Stanley Fish, in The Chronicle of Higher Education) (https://www.chronicle.com/article/Free-Speech-Is-Not-an-Academic/239536) --The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion (by Jonathan Haidt) (https://www.amazon.com/Righteous-Mind-Divided-Politics-Religion/dp/0307455777) --"Don't Sweat the Technique," (by Eric B. & Rakim) (https://youtu.be/g7DJG9rNiTI) Special Guests: Aaron Hanlon and Jonathan Haidt.

There’s No Such Thing As Free Speech! Stanley Fish, Professor of Law at the Cardozo School of Law and author of many books, including the landmark study There is No Such Thing as Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too; Winning Arguments: What Works and Doesn't Work in Politics, the Bedroom, the Courtroom, and the Classroom; How to Write a Sentence, and How to Read One, and a forthcoming book on the First Amendment's role in our culture called The First, makes the case that there isn't such a thing as free speech—at least not in an absolutist sense. And universities, among other institutions, have always regulated it. In fact, as Fish makes clear in plain and simple terms, without regulating the idea of speech makes no sense at all -- for then we would not be able to distinguish between meaningful expressions and gibberish. Fish is one of the leading voices in the American speech debates of the last three decades, and never shy to take a stand.

As in previous years and decades, the freedom of exchange of ideas and freedom of inquiry on college campuses are subjects of debate. In this episode, Sargent talks with legal and literary theorist Stanley Fish (https://cardozo.yu.edu/directory/stanley-fish) (author of, among other things, "There's No Such Thing As Free Speech, and It's a Good Thing, Too") as well as Bates College classicist Margaret Imber (https://www.bates.edu/classical-medieval/faculty/imber-margaret-a/). Special Guests: Margaret Imber and Stanley Fish.

Welcome to Mere Rhetoric, the podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, terms and movements who have shaped rhetorical history. I’m Mary Hedengren and I’ve been reading A Christmas Carol this holiday season because I’m playing Mrs. Crachit in a community theatre production. And wow. There is a story behind that. But becaue I was interested in The christmas carol, so I started reading The Man Who Invented Christmas, Les Standiford’s history of Dickens’s masterpeice. I was surprised to hear how A Christmas Carol had solidified Christmas as we know it, a home-and-family holiday rather than a racacus drunken orgy of disrule. Yeah, Christmas used to be like that. In fact, there was a debate about Christmas raging over several centuries when Scrooge came on the scene. After Dickens, though, industrialists started giving their employees Christmas Day off, and everyone started sending their workers the ubiquitous Christmas turkey. Robert Louis Stevenson, upon reading Dickens’s Christmas Carol first cried his eyes out and then committed to donate money to the poor. Even Dickens’s best frienemy and critic, William Makepeace Thackery, was deeply moved by it. Dickens’s book had, in the words of Lord Jeffrey “fostered more kindly feelings and prompted more positive acts of beneficence” than all the sermons in all the churches pervious. So if literature is so powerful to change the way people live, why isn’t it considered rhetoric? That question is probably best addressed in Steven Mailloux (My-U)’s Rhetorical Power. In the book that would in some ways define his career, Mailloux advances a rhetorical perspective of literature that would present a middle ground between idealist and realist literary theory. He calls the exercise of this perspective “rhetorical hermeneutics” which he suggests as an “anti-Theory theory” that will  “determine how texts are established as meaningful through rhetorical exchanges” (15). It isn’t just the content or, to use the old fashioned phrase, “theme” of a book that impacts people, but the way the story is drawn through, and the techniques that the author gets us to buy into. Such a reading differs wildly from the notions of New Criticisms that would restrict interpretation to the page and from even Stanley Fish’s narrow academic interpretative community. Instead, the work is rooted in a specific history, rhetorical tradition, and cultural conversation (145-6). We can be impacted by 19th century books, but not the in same way that Lord Jeffrey and Stevenson were. There are conversations going on and arguments made in the book catalogs of any culture. Mailloux claims that this perspective is not only engaged in the world outside the text, but also describes the temporal experience of reading. In this way, literature exits circles of elite academic interpretative communities and instead belongs to the community of readers at large. The text has an individual influence as well. Mailloux describes how a text can educate a reader (41) and train the reader to see and think a certain way as the text progresses (99). This education depends on the form of the work, how the work develops from premise to premise. Moby Dick is Mailloux’s main example of this kind of trained reading. The disappearing narrator through chapters isn’t just an error; it’s an education. In this way, rhetorical hermeneutics seem to draw on both Kenneth Burke’s discussion of form in Counter-statement and Wayne Booth’s concerns about immoral narration in The Rhetoric of Fiction. While Mailloux uses Moby Dick as his primary example of the education of the reader within the pages of a book, he spends more time discussing the way that a text’s educating qualities relate to a community’s debate, and what better example could he use than The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn?     In Mark Twain’s book, Mailloux has a prime example of the way a work “includes rhetorical histories of interpretative disputes” (135).  Because of the way Twain’s work was part of the national debates of the “Negro Question” and the “Bad Boy Boom,” it can clearly demonstrate a reading that prioritizes not the “isolated readers and isolated texts” but the entire “rhetorical exchanges among interpreters embedded in discursive and other social practices at specific historical moments” (133).  We often think of Huckleberry Finn in terms of race only, because that’s the predominant issue from the book for our culture, but the issue of “bad boys” was even more pressing on Twain’s contemporaries, which may seems a shocking undersight to modern readers. Huckleberry Finn was originally banned from some schools and library for showing a bad boy getting away with rebellion.  Mailloux demonstrates that there were many pieces of literature of all sorts discussing what to do with juvenile delinquent boys, and Twain’s contribution in the unintentionally humane and thoughtful Huckleberry was a response to, and instigator of, some of the alarm. Moving from Mark Twain, Mailloux applies his theory to contemporary political disputes, demonstrating that this kind of reading practice isn’t exclusive to formal literature. So we come full circle. Literature participates in a wider societal conversation, and our political conversations can benefit of a reading as intense as the one we give to literature. As Mailloux says “textual interpretation and rhetorical politics can never be separated” (180).     So if you do a little light reading this holiday break, you might take a moment and wonder, what, exactly, are the political implications of what you’re reading. If you found a deeper level of rhetorical discourse in your holiday reading, why not drop us a line at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com? This is Mary Hedengren, ruining your vacation from Mere Rhetoric.

On Christian Teaching   Welcome to Mere Rhetoric the podcast for beginners and insiders about the people, ideas and movement that have shaped rhetorical history. Big thanks to the University of Texas’ Humanities Media Project for supporting the podcast.   Today we get to talk about the saint who brought classical rhetoric into the realm of Christian homiletics. Augustine was a fourth century saint whose life in someways demonstrates the great sea-changes in the Mediterranean world of rhetoric, education and religion. His father was pagan, his mother was Christian and young Augustine describes himself as a bit of a genius hedonist in his Confessions. His teachers were supposedly terrible, but he mastered the standards of a Roman education—Virgil and Cicero. He eventually became a rhetoric teacher in Carthage, Rome and Milan. He taught rhetoric all told for somewhere between ten and fifteen years, before his eventual conversion to Christianity and vocation as a priest and the bishop of Hippo. He must have spent a lot of time pondering the question of how his previous career as one who taught other people how to persuade could be reconciled with his new religion’s emphasis on inspiration. If God will give the preacher exactly the words which he needs, either through scripture or through divine inspiration, is there any space for a Christian rhetoric? He started working on his definition of Christian rhetoric as early as the 390s, but On Christian Teaching wasn’t finished until 427, only three years before his death. Throughout those forty years, Augustine must have thought about the practical question of whether Christian preachers could be trained to give better sermons, much as he had spent more than a decade teaching young men in the principles secular rhetoric.   The first argument that Augustine has to make is that Christian teaching can be rhetorical. Rhetoric was seen as pagan and more than a little sneaky. Augustine argues that rhetoric may be used by Christians as a means of spoiling of Egypt to adorn the temples of Jerusalem (Green’s 64-7). The biblical allusion he’s making comes from the flight of the Hebrews from Egypt who took pagan gold with them to make their own religious items. Augustine’s metaphor implies that rhetoric, like the gold itself, is valuable, but it must be melted down and essentialized from its current pagan form. Augustine goes on to argue that Christians not only benefit from using rhetoric, but they avoid rhetoric at their own peril. Because “rhetoric is used to give conviction to both truth and falsehood” why should truth “stand unarmed in the fight against falsehood” (101)? So Augustine argues that rhetoric has both positive and defensive value, but as part of the melting down of the pagan gold idols, he recommends several key differences from classical rhetoric.   First, the similarities: there’s a lot that Augustine believes that the Christian can be taught about oratory, especially he classical idea of the three levels of speaking, high, middle and plain. He is very willing to steal the gold, also, of the three aims of the orator, to instrut, delight and move, which Augustine calls “to be listened to with understanding, with pleasure and with obedience” (87). Even the methods of instruction can be taken from the pagan rhetors. Imitation looms large, except more Paul, perhaps, and less Cicero. Augustine sees the bible as not just source material, but examplars. This is a very Classical way of teaching style. Augustine’s destinction between “things” (the content) and “signs” (the proclaimation of the content) is itself a very classical distinction. Augustine’s “Egyptian gold” seems to be of a very Platonic and Ciceronian ore, but he does melt it down to reform it into a more Christian shape through two important moves.     First, Augustine puts a heavy emphasis on the ethos of the speaker. Classical rhetoric, too, especially Cicero, who Augustine read, valued ethos, but for Augustine, the character of the preacher is important for practical as well as theological reasons. Augustine demands that the speaker live a good life and be in companionship with the inspiration of the Spirit of God. While Augustine admits that “A wise and eloquent speaker who lives a wicked life certainly educates many who are eager to learn, although he is useless to his own soul,” he believes that the speaker in front on an audience should, in the best case, be the best sort of man (142). The speaker who is a good person can teach through acts as well as through words. By living lives that were beyond reproach, the preachers who follow Augustine “benefit far more people if they practiced what they preached” (143). This follows Paul’s injunction to his own teacher-in-training, Timothy, when he says about bishops that they “must have a good report of them which are without” (1 Tim. 3:7). The people outside of the church as well as in, would be best to have a good example teaching them               But for Augustine, it’s not enough just to live a moral life—pagan Stoics and Epicureans can similarly follow rules they have made for themselves. Augustine also says that the preacher needs to pray and receive the Holy Ghost’s instruction. The preacher needs to pray in preparation “praying for himself and for those he is about to address” (121). He needs the prayer in order to be able to be an instrument of the Spirit and the audience need the prayer so they can be receptive to the message. The preacher gets the truth of the subject as well as the delivery from the prayer. As a vessel fro the truth the preacher prays so he “can utter what he had drunk in and pour out what has filled him” (121). Augustine even goes as far as to say of the preacher that “he derives more from his devotion to prayer than his dedication to oratory” (121). The idea behind this is that eloquence can come as does inspiration to speak the right thing—from the inspiration of the Spirit. Augustine even goes as far as to say of the preacher that “he derives more from his devotion to prayer than his dedication to oratory” (121). This idea that the preacher can appeal to divine eloquence instead of considering the rhetorical situation has made several 20th century scholars frustrated with Augustine. Kenneth Burke complains in Rhetoric of Motives that Augustine seeks “cajoling of an audience [not] routing of opponents.” I don’t pretend to know every Burke means, but that seems like a bit of an unfair argument because Augustine spends most of his time describing homiletics, a genre that operates on the assumption that the speaker and the audience are already in agreement on most of the key principles, if not the application and degree. Once they’ve put on the stiff suit, or itchy nylons and are sitting on the hard-backed pews at an unreasonable hour of a Sunday morning, you’ve already won a large part of the battle. Your audience is probably less diametrically opposed to you than would be, say, the senate in a legislative speech or the jury in a judicial speech. Stanley Fish objects that that Augstine’s dependence on spirit depreciates the speaker, which is actually a very old argument against Christian homiletics. In the Renaissance, rhetoric was a scary idea in general and we’ll talk about Wayne Rebhorn’s books about rhetoric debates later, but the key thing is that Augustine along with his critics had to deal with how rhetoric fits into one of the key Christian paradoxes: that men are both “little lower than the angels” and also “less than the dust of the earth.” Fish is right that Augustine’s reliance on spirit depreciates the agency of the speaker, but he neglects that for Augustine the steps necessary to receive the spirit—obedience and prayer—are responsibilities of the speaker, as necessary to a Christian canon of rhetoric as invention and arrangement. And it’s not just a Christian rhetoric that Augustine is describing here: it’s a neo-Platonic one. Plato’s influence is seen all over On Christian Doctrine. You might not remember from our episode on the Pheadrus, but Plato believed that eternal truths about, for example, beauty could be “remembered” in this world. What we are remembering are the glimpses of truth that we were able to see in a spirit world where we were able to control our rash desires. In other words, when we were obedient to our better selves. Augustine was a big fan of Plato, but as a rhetorician, he probably liked the pro-rhetoric Plato best. In On Christian Doctrine, Augustine seeks a way to reconcile his neo-Platonist philosophy, Christianity and the idea that good preaching is a skill that can be teachable and improved. In the turn of the fourth century, Augustine witnessed both the 410 sack of Rome and the 430 Vandal invasion of Hippo, his own home. He lived right on the boundary between the end of the old, Roman Mediterranean world and the rise of the Christian European one. In all of the tumultuous change that was about to begin, Augustine recommended adaption, not revolution, as Christians reused the best rhetorical practices of the pagan world to build their new era.          

Sometimes it's impossible to avoid an argument. That's why on today's Please Explain, we're learning how to make a convincing case with Stanley Fish, law professor and dean emeritus of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences at the University of Illinois at Chicago. His latest book, Winning Arguments: What Works and Doesn't Work in Politics, the Bedroom, the Courtroom, and the Classroom, is a guide to using wit, observation, logic and rhetoric to win the toughest arguments, whether at the workplace or at home.   Need to win an argument? Send us your questions in a comment below, or let us know on Twitter or Facebook!

The post Is There a Truth in This Class? A Conversation with Stanley Fish appeared first on AlbertMohler.com.

James Berlin     Welcome to MR. I’m Mary Hedengren, Jacob is in the Booth and we’re supported by the Humanities Media Project and UT Austin.   Was English in an identity crisis in the 80s and 90s? Maybe. But it’s certain that it thought it was. Interdisciplinary projects such as cultural studies and the voluntary expulsion of groups like English language and composition from English departments was inspiring a lot of ink in the PMLA and other journals and conferences between such illuminaries as Gerald Graff and Stanley Fish. And when people are anxious about who they are, they often look back to how they ended up here. How did English get so weird? What is the background behind composition’s complaints against literary studies? What led to everyone in the department being in a department together?   Enter Professor James Berlin. Berlin, a compositionist who had taught at U of Cinninati and Purdue. Berlin was a disciplinary historian who wrote two important books that tried to create a historical context for the current state of composition, which we’ll talk about today. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges. 1900-1985. Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1987. Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges. The earlier book, Writing Instruction in 19th-Century American Colleges published in 1984, traces the role of writing instruction in American political psyche. “no rhetoric—not Plato’s or Aris­totle’s or Quintilian’s or Perelman’s—is permanent.”     The next major book Berlin wrote picks up where Writing Instruction in Nineteenth-Century American Colleges. Left off—at the dawn of the 20th century. Rhetoric and Reality: Writing Instruction in American Colleges. 1900-1985 traces the history of composition in the United States up to what was then the modern day. In going through this history, though, Berlin weaves three strands of compositional theory: current-traditional, expressivist and social constructionist. Berlin makes no secret about which of these strands he thinks is right. Current traditionalists are grammar-obsessed ninnies who sneer at students while pushing their glasses up their noses while expressivists are berkinstocked hippies singing kumbaya without teaching anything significant. Berlin is unapologetic about his perspective. In the introduction, he mentions the criticism the book has received as having a political project. James Berlin, much like the honey badger, don’t care. He has a strong interest in the project to "vindicate the position of writing instruction in the college curriculum" (1) and he feels social constructionism is the best way to do so. He identifies several points that lead to writing instruction’s increased disciplinarity First there was the Birth of CCCC when a 1948 paper by George S. Wykoff and ensuing conflict leads to John Gerber of U of Iowa proposing a conference to discuss composition. 500 attend April 1-2 1949 (105). "With the establishment of the CCCC and its journal [...] teachers of freshman composition took a giant step toward qualifying for full membership in the English department, with the attendant privileges" (106)   Then there is the Importance of pamphlet The Basic Issues in the Teaching of English published as a supplement to College English in 1959. Identify key questions for English, especially in pedagogy (such as should writing "be taught as expression or as communication") (Berlin 124).   Finally there was Braddock's 1961   Research in Written Communication and subsequent founding of Research in the Teaching of English (1967) is important because "Only a discipline confident of its value and its future could allow this kind of harsh scrutiny" (135). Lit studies "have appropriated as their domain all uses of langauge except the narrowly refertial and logical. What remains [...] is given to rhetoric, to the writing course" (30).   In the early 20th century, universities were becoming dominated by sciences and practical arts. Objective philosophies ruled. Current-traditional is the most vehement and widely accepted of the objective rhetorics, but behaviorist, semanticist and linguistic rhetorics are also put into this category (9). As Berlin puts it: "The new university invested its graduates with the authority of science and through this authority gave them an economically comfortable position in a new, prosperous middle-class culture" (36)   On the other extreme of things was expressionist writing "the teacher cannot even instruct the student in the principles of writing, since writing is inextricably intertwined with the discovery of truth. The student can discover truth, but truth cannot be taught; the student can learn to write, but writing cannot be taught. The only strategy left, then is to provide an environment in which the individual can learn what cannot be taught" (13).   Berlin describes that, "For the proponents of liberal culture, the purpose of the English teacher was to cultivate the exceptional students, the geniuses, and, at the most, to tolerate all others" (72). For expressionists "writing--all writing--is art. This means that writing can be learned by not taught" (74). How many times do we hear that? That you just need to ponder a little, get a little older and then you’ll pick up what you need to? This is still kind of the philosophy in many Eastern Hemisphere universities where writing instruction hasn’t taken off as much. And it exists here, too, even in our own departments.   The method of expressionist teaching will be familiar to those in creative writing :"Most important was that the students read all papers aloud to the entire class and were given immediate responses [...] the teacher did not lecture but acted instead  as an ad-[83]ditional respondant" (84). For more about expressionism and what influence it had on rhetoric and composition, check out our previous podcast on expressivism. Berlin’s last book Rhetorics, Poetics and Cultures was also a disciplinary project--reconciling composition (production) with literary studies (interpretation) by way of cultural studies--may seem a little dated to the 90s, which its heady enthrallment with cross-disciplinary cultural studies and post-modernity everywhere as specter and savior. He argues that English should reunite rhetoric and literary studies around text interpretation and production-not one or the other exclusively. He doesn’t just argue in theory but sets out his own class as an example of how to integrate textual production and analysis with general cultural studies. He emphatically defends the use of popular culture in the classroom and meeting students with the knowledge the already have. James Berlin died suddenly of a heart attack while he was still in the middle of career, but his influence is found all around the composition world. For example, the CCCC award for best dissertation is called the James Berlin award, and I think that’s fitting, considering how the establishment of a phd in composition has been such a benchmark in composition’s disciplinarity. Are we at a better place in terms of disciplinary security than we were in the 80s and 90s? I think so. I also think that part o the reason why is James Berlin’s impassioned disciplinary research and fervent argumentation. If you have impassioned discipline and fervent argumentation, feel free to email us at mererhetoricpodcast@gmail.com  

Enjoy some of our older archived podcasts where Leigh Bortins interviews different guests. In this episode Leigh interviews author, Stanley Fish as they discuss his most current book, How to Write a Sentence: And How to Read One. The episode is from 2011.

On the Overthinking It Podcast, we tackle recent Supreme Court decisions, why the law is like a TV Recap, and what Stanley Fish thinks about Aaron Sorkin. Episode 365: Everything You Thought You Knew about the Author’s Intention Is Wrong, And What Happens Next Will Blow Your Mind originally appeared on Overthinking It, the site subjecting the popular culture to a level of scrutiny it probably doesn't deserve. [Latest Posts | Podcast (iTunes Link)]

SynTalk thinks about theories & theorizing, while constantly wondering whether theories are explanatory as well as speculative (‘what-if’). Are all theories, in a sense, artistic creations and inventions (rather than discoveries)? Can we take the human out of the equation? The concepts are derived off / from Euclid, Newton, Leibniz, Alexander Pope, Robert Hooke, Boole, Faraday, Maxwell, Gauss, Hilbert, Godel, Bourbaki, Abraham Robinson, Weinberg, Stanley Fish, Lawvere, & Stephen Wolfram, among others. How all physical theories have a desire to predict & look into the future. How mathematical theories, however, do not need to predict and have no role for evidence. Further, how theories in literature are an attempt to explain the process of interpretation? Are there theories that are finished pieces of work (test: when all true statements are provable)? Are some theories destined to be incomplete? Will we ever have a complete theory for poetry? Is all of mathematics just a theory? Do all theories (real numbers, classical mechanics) have limits? Is everything that is there to be known about a triangle now known? How a theory comes to be conceived in areas far far removed from available knowledge, via a leap of imagination or (even) an act of faith. How ‘non-logical axioms’ when put into the magical black box of ‘logic’ churns out a list of ‘provable statements’. How crystalline & elegant axioms are often identified after years of calculations. Can we, for instance, axiomatize the notion of space or theorize about some currently ill understood domains of gravitation at the largest scale? How logic specifies a grammar for construction. How double negation may not work in some systems (what is not true is not necessarily false). May the idea of the observable or the ways of seeing itself be theoretical constructions? Can finished theories have parallel ways of thinking (say, lines of force, fields of force, or electromagnetic potential)? The links between theoreticity and abstraction, & is (even) man a theory (‘the proper study of mankind is man’?). Are (electrical) circuit laws completely autonomous of the fundamental Maxwell equations? Are Laws the robe and Theory the wardrobe? The links between dog star, functor, earthquake, QCD, ‘mortal grossness’, Nile floods, fluxions, video games, chariot, White Males, synthetic differential geometry, love-dove-&-shove, & the salt doll. How theories wax & wane with the consensus and dissensus of interpretive communities. Are there universal truths? Can we simulate the answer to any question with extremely efficient computation without theories? Will theory itself come to an end in the long run? The SynTalkrs are: Dr. Partha Pratim Ghosh (mathematics, ISI, Tezpur), Prof. Pramod K. Nayar (literature, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad), & Prof. Urjit A. Yajnik (physics, IIT Bombay, Mumbai).

In Toronto's Junction, Colin Marshall talks to Amy Lavender Harris, geographer at York University and author of Imagining Toronto, a study of the city as depicted in its literature. They discuss the psychedelically-illustrated, Toronto-centric poetry of Dennis Lee with which so many Torontonians grew up; how it took her thirty years from her Lee-reading days to come to understand the full scope of Toronto literature; In the Skin of a Lion, Michael Ondaatje's much-named, little-read novel of city-building; how she first went about creating a university course on Toronto literature; her "personal fetish," the narrative of place; multiculturalism as Toronto's foundational myth; why Torontonians falsely believe the United Nations declared their city the world's most diverse; the "eternal haggle" of life here; how she's come to agree, at least halfway, with the description of the city as "a place where people live, but not where things happen"; why, in Canada, everyone has a hyphen; her non-Canadian-born husband's appreciation of the country as one where "people have nothing to declare"; Torontonian manifestations of Stanley Fish's "boutique multiculturalism" and Charles Taylor's "inspired ad-hocing"; why hating Toronto became such a literary and social tradition; no longer talking about achieving "world class" status as a sign of having achieved it; what about Toronto architecture makes people call it ugly, and why buildings that make people talk have already succeeded; the significance of the ravines in the Torontonian consciousness; 1960's suburban satire The Torontonians and the Canadian "flourishing of cultural production" that would come later that decade; Canada's thoroughgoing urbanness against its imaginary self-conception as a rural country; and the important elements of Toronto — remaining, vanishing, and gone — identified in one particular Dennis Lee poem.  

Michial Farmer and Nathan Gilmour converse about Pragmatism, a distinctly American philosophical tradition, and its roots in logic, capitalism, and pluralism. Along the way we discuss the three famous figures of early-twentieth-century pragmatism, the postmodern turn that neo-pragmatism takes in the late twentieth century, and the ways in which pragmatism and Christianity exist uneasily but undeniably together in American thought. Among the philosophers and other realities discussed are C.S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and David Bentley Hart.

Michial Farmer and Nathan Gilmour converse about Pragmatism, a distinctly American philosophical tradition, and its roots in logic, capitalism, and pluralism. Along the way we discuss the three famous figures of early-twentieth-century pragmatism, the postmodern turn that neo-pragmatism takes in the late twentieth century, and the ways in which pragmatism and Christianity exist uneasily but undeniably together in American thought. Among the philosophers and other realities discussed are C.S. Peirce, William James, John Dewey, Richard Rorty, Stanley Fish, and David Bentley Hart.

“If you count it, they will come” - Stanley Fish, Humanities and Law, Florida International University “Textualities in the Digital Age” focuses on concrete examples of digital projects and then moves to broader considerations of tools and approaches to help the audience consider how digital methodologies might expand the horizons of their own research. The symposium participants present a range of approaches to digital texts, from digital critical editions to computer-assisted historical inquiry.

Have you ever said to yourself, “Ya know, one day I’m gonna write a book”?  Most people have but they haven’t the slightest clue on how to correctly form INTERESTING sentences.  Sure, you can put words together in a straight line, but if you really want to learn about the art of writing then you...

Podcast Transcript... The post The Fate of Ideas in the Modern Age: A Conversation with Stanley Fish appeared first on AlbertMohler.com.

In this lecture on critical identities, Professor Fry examines the work of Stanley Fish and John Guillory. The lecture begins by examining Tony the Tow Truck as a site for the emergence of literary identities, then brings the course's use of the children's story under scrutiny through the lens of Fish. The evolution of Fish's theory of interpretive communities is traced chronologically through his publications and examined in close-up in Milton's Paradise Lost. John Guillory's work on interpretive communities and the culture wars leads to a discussion of the Western canon and multiculturalism.

Milton's characteristic use of simile is explored in Books One and Two of Paradise Lost. Particular attention is paid to how Milton's similes work to support, undermine, and complicate both the depiction of Satan and the broader thematic concerns of the poem, such as the ideas of free will and divine providence. The critical perspectives of Geoffrey Hartman and Stanley Fish are incorporated into an analysis of Satan's shield and spear and the simile of the leaves.

Milton's characteristic use of simile is explored in Books One and Two of Paradise Lost. Particular attention is paid to how Milton's similes work to support, undermine, and complicate both the depiction of Satan and the broader thematic concerns of the poem, such as the ideas of free will and divine providence. The critical perspectives of Geoffrey Hartman and Stanley Fish are incorporated into an analysis of Satan's shield and spear and the simile of the leaves.

In this lecture on critical identities, Professor Fry examines the work of Stanley Fish and John Guillory. The lecture begins by examining Tony the Tow Truck as a site for the emergence of literary identities, then brings the course's use of the children's story under scrutiny through the lens of Fish. The evolution of Fish's theory of interpretive communities is traced chronologically through his publications and examined in close-up in Milton's Paradise Lost. John Guillory's work on interpretive communities and the culture wars leads to a discussion of the Western canon and multiculturalism.