Harry Frankfurt

Infobox Person
name= Harry Gordon Frankfurt


caption= Professor Frankfurt
birth_date= May 29, 1929
birth_place=
death_date=
death_place=

Harry Gordon Frankfurt (born May 29, 1929) is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University. He 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 [Feinberg; Shafer-Landau: "Reason & Responsibility", p. 486.] ) based on his concept of higher-order volitions, and for developing what are known as "Frankfurt counterexamples" (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 chose freely). However, his later work on love and caring is now equally discussed.

Bibliography

*cite book
title=On Truth
publisher=Random House
year=2006
id=ISBN 0-307-26422-X
pages=112 pp
*cite book
title=Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting It Right
publisher=Stanford University Press
year=2006
id=ISBN 0-80475-298-2
pages=104 pp
*cite book
title=On Bullshit
publisher=Princeton University Press
year=2005
id=ISBN 0-691-12294-6
pages=80 pp
*cite book
title=The Reasons of Love
publisher=Princeton University Press
year=2004
*cite book
title=Necessity, Volition, and Love
publisher=Cambridge University Press
year=1999
*cite book
title=The Importance of What We Care about: Philosophical Essays
publisher=Cambridge University Press
year=1988
*cite book
title=Freedom of the Will and the Concept of the Person
publisher=Journal of Philosophy
year=1971
*cite book
title=Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen (The Philosophy of Descartes)
publisher=Bobbs-Merrill
year=1970

ee also

Frankfurt counterexamples

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.

Notes

External links

* [http://web.princeton.edu/sites/philosph/faculty_contact.htm Princeton Faculty Listing]
* [http://video.google.com/videoplay?docid=-8001832135022218975 2007 Harry Frankfurt Video Feature Interview on The Alcove with Mark Molaro]
* [http://personal.lse.ac.uk/voorhoev/Harry%20Frankfurt%20website.pdf 'The Necessity of Love. An Interview with Harry Frankfurt' by Alex Voorhoeve in Philosophical Writings 23 (2003): 55-70.]
* [http://philosophytalk.org/pastShows/BS.html Radio interview] on Philosophy Talk