Harry G. Frankfurt

Harry Gordon Frankfurt/Professor Frankfurt
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.