Fish, Stanley. Think Again

Stanley Fish’s Think Again collects almost one hundred of its author’s New York Times columns, written between 1995 and 2013, and selected and thematically arranged for this volume by Fish himself. As soon as you open the book you’re given a warning. These “are not, for the most part, opinion pieces” (xi), Fish states, “that is, they are less likely to declare a position on a disputed matter than to anatomize, and perhaps critique, the arguments deployed by opposing constituencies” (xi). This, in itself, is already a contrarian reflection on life (the book’s subtitle is: “contrarian reflections on life, culture, politics, religion, law, and education”) and it constitutes a stance so powerful that I regard it as potentially revolutionary in a world – the Western world of 2016–so constructed on rhetoric and spin that the value of an argument doesn’t stand anymore on its logical premises (= its content) but on the set of assets displayed by the argument’s deliverer (tone, conviction, emotion, surface logic etc.).