Harry Frankfurt
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| Harry Gordon Frankfurt | |
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 Professor Frankfurt
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| Born | May 29, 1929 |
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 Ph.D. in 1954 at 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 look at "bullshit" and how it is both used and understood today, was republished as a book in 2005 and became a surprise best seller. In 2006 he released a followup book, On Truth, which explores how society has lost its appreciation for truth.
Frankfurt has appeared on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show twice, on March 14. 2005, and again on January 9, 2007.
Among philosophers Frankfurt is best known for his interpretation of Descartes's rationalism, for his account of freedom of the will based on his concept of higher-order volitions, and for developing what are known as "Frankfurt counterexamples", thought experiments in the philosophy of action 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 that, he/she nonetheless chose freely.
[edit] Bibliography
- (2006) On Truth. Random House, 112 pp. ISBN 0-307-26422-X.
- (2006) Taking Ourselves Seriously & Getting It Right. Stanford University Press, 104 pp. ISBN 0-80475-298-2.
- (2005) On Bullshit. Princeton University Press, 80 pp. ISBN 0-691-12294-6.
- (2004) The Reasons of Love. Princeton University Press.
- (1999) Necessity, Volition, and Love. Cambridge University Press.
- (1988) The Importance of What We Care about: Philosophical Essays. Cambridge University Press.
- (1971) Freedom of the Will and the Concept of the Person. Journal of Philosophy.
- (1970) Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen (The Philosophy of Descartes). Bobbs-Merrill.
[edit] Further reading
- 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.
