Wednesday 27 February 2008

Fish, on a fish out of water

In the NYT opinion section there's a post from Stanley Fish that tries to distinguish good and bad reasons for opposing a controversial university appointment: thoughtful as always. For example, here's a striking portrait of the plight of the outsider in certain special kinds of community:
he or she will lack the internalized understanding that renders the features of the enterprise intelligible, and in the absence of that understanding, the wanderer in a strange land will see only anomalies and mistakes that should be corrected. Items in a practice are not known piecemeal; you don’t learn them by listing them. You learn them by being so embedded in the practice that everything that happens within it has a significance you don’t have to strain for because it is perspicuous without any mental effort at all ...

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

It looks different!

Bruce Yabsley said...

Yeah, I'd never been entirely happy with the previous template, and had been wondering whether to revert to the original ... but decided I preferred this one (my third). I'll need a bit of time to work out whether this is an out-and-out preference, or merely a matter of needing a change every once in a while.