Harry Frankfurt

Harry Frankfurt

Harry Frankfurt
Full name	Harry Frankfurt
Born	May 29, 1929 (1929-05-29)
Era	20th-century philosophy / Contemporary philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Analytic philosophy
Main interests	Moral philosophy, philosophy of mind, free will, love, philosophy of action
Notable ideas	Frankfurt counterexamples, Higher-order volition, Theory of bullshit
Influenced by Descartes, Kant, Wittgenstein
Influenced Susan Wolf, J. David Velleman

Harry Gordon Frankfurt (born May 29, 1929) is an American philosopher. He is professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University and has previously taught at Yale University and Rockefeller University. He obtained his B.A. in 1949 and Ph.D. in 1954 from Johns Hopkins University. His major areas of interest include moral philosophy, philosophy of mind and action, and 17th century rationalism. His 1986 paper On Bullshit, a philosophical investigation of the concept of "bullshit", was republished as a book in 2005 and became a surprise bestseller, leading to media appearances such as Jon Stewart's The Daily Show. In 2006 he released a companion book, On Truth, which explores society's loss of appreciation for truth.

Among philosophers, Frankfurt was for a time best known for his interpretation of Descartes's rationalism, his account of freedom of the will (on which he has written numerous important papers) based on his concept of higher-order volitions, and for developing what are known as "Frankfurt cases" (i.e., thought experiments designed to show the possibility of situations in which a person could not have done other than he/she did, but in which our intuition is to say nonetheless that he/she acted freely). However, his later work on love and caring is now equally discussed.

Bibliography

• On Truth. Random House. 2006. p. 112 pp. ISBN 0-307-26422-X. 
• Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting It Right. Stanford University Press. 2006. p. 104 pp. ISBN 0-80475-298-2. 
• On Bullshit. Princeton University Press. 2005. p. 80 pp. ISBN 0-691-12294-6. 
• The Reasons of Love. Princeton University Press. 2004. 
• Necessity, Volition, and Love. Cambridge University Press. 1999. 
• The Importance of What We Care about: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge University Press. 1988. 
• Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen (The Philosophy of Descartes). Bobbs-Merrill. 1970. 

Interviews with Frankfurt

• 'The Necessity of Love' in Alex Voorhoeve Conversations on Ethics. Oxford University Press, 2009. ISBN 978-0-19-921537-9 (A discussion of his views on moral responsibility, caring and love, and the relationship of his later work on the structure of the will to his earlier work on Descartes.)

See also

• Frankfurt counterexamples
• American philosophy
• List of American philosophers

References

• Bischof, Michael H. (2004). Kann ein Konzept der Willensfreiheit auf das Prinzip der alternativen Möglichkeiten verzichten? Harry G. Frankfurts Kritik am Prinzip der alternativen Möglichkeiten (PAP). In: Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung (ZphF), Heft 4.
• Frankfurt, Harry. "Alternate Possibilities and Moral Responsibility". In Reason & Responsibility: Readings in Some Basic Problems of Philosophy, edited by Joel Feinberg and Russ Shafer-Landau, 486-492. California: Thomson Wadsworth, 2008.

External links

• Princeton Faculty Listing
• 2007 Harry Frankfurt Video Feature Interview on The Alcove with Mark Molaro
• Radio interview on Philosophy Talk