First Things RSS Feed - Stanley Fish https://www.firstthings.com/author/stanley-fish en-us Copyright 2025 First Things. All Rights Reserved. ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) ft@firstthings.com (The Editors) Mon, 20 Jan 2025 16:57:01 -0500 https://d2201k5v4hmrsv.cloudfront.net/img/favicon-196.png First Things RSS Feed Image https://www.firstthings.com/rss/author/stanley-fish 60 ​Epic Ending https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/04/epic-ending https://www.firstthings.com/article/2016/04/epic-ending Fri, 01 Apr 2016 00:00:00 -0400 Inside Paradise Lost
 by david quint
 princeton, 344 pages, $35

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]]> Why We Can’t All Just Get Along https://www.firstthings.com/article/1996/02/001-why-we-cant-all-just-get-along https://www.firstthings.com/article/1996/02/001-why-we-cant-all-just-get-along Thu, 01 Feb 1996 00:00:00 -0500 Whenever I teach Paradise Lost , the hardest thing to get across is that God is God. Students invariably (one is tempted to say “naturally”) fall in with the view declared by William Empson in Milton’s God when he says that “ all the characters are on trial in any civilized narrative.” In Milton’s narrative, of course, God is a central character, and the entire story gets going, Empson observes, when Satan “doubts his credentials.” Empson analogizes the situation to that “of a Professor doubting the credentials of his Vice-Chancellor,” and remarks with some sarcasm that “such a man would not be pursued with infinite malignity into eternal torture, but given evidence which put the credentials beyond doubt.”

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]]> Stanley Fish replies to Richard John Neuhaus https://www.firstthings.com/article/1996/02/stanley-fish-replies-to-richard-john-neuhaus https://www.firstthings.com/article/1996/02/stanley-fish-replies-to-richard-john-neuhaus Thu, 01 Feb 1996 00:00:00 -0500 Father Neuhaus mistakes my position when he says (or implies) that I pit freedom of inquiry against truth or critical thought against a commitment to truth, or, more simply, faith against reason. In fact I don’t regard these as opposed to one another (they are not binaries) but as mutually interdependent. The difference between a believer and a nonbeliever is not that one reasons and the other doesn’t, but that one reasons from a first premise the other denies; and from this difference flow others that make the fact that both are reasoning a sign not of commonality but of its absence.

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