Fish, Stanley

Introduction

Stanley Fish is a scholar of sixteenth- and seventeenth-century English Literature whose work expanded into the areas of legal and political philosophy. This was not a new direction so much as an extension of philosophical commitments that he had developed in his earlier work. One of these commitments was a conception of the self that could be described as falling within the communitarian tradition. Fish argues that the attributes that people acquire by being socialized into different institutions, and by being embedded in particular local contexts, are not secondary attributes of a deeper, more enduring self. Rather the self is completely constituted by its local commitments. Take them away, and you would not have an essential, stripped-down self, rather you would have no self at all. A second important philosophical commitment is to an anti-foundationalist epistemology. Simply put, anti-foundationalism holds that there is no unmediated perception of the world and hence...