Harry Frankfurt

Harry Gordon Frankfurt (May 29, 1929 – July 16, 2023) was an American philosopher.

Frankfurt was born David Bernard Stern at a home for unwed mothers in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, on May 29, 1929, and did not know his biological parents.

Shortly after his birth, he was adopted by a middle-class Jewish family and given a new name, Harry Gordon Frankfurt.

His adoptive parents, Bertha (née Gordon) and Nathan Frankfurt, a piano teacher and a bookkeeper, respectively, raised him in Brooklyn and Baltimore.

He attended Johns Hopkins University, where he obtained his Bachelor of Arts in 1949 and Doctor of Philosophy in 1954, both in philosophy.

Frankfurt was professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University.

He previously taught at Ohio State University (1956–1962), SUNY Binghamton (1962–1963), Rockefeller University (from 1963 until the philosophy department was closed in 1976), Yale University (from 1976, where he served as chair of the philosophy department 1978–1987), and then Princeton University (1990–2002).

He was a professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, where he taught from 1990 until 2002.

Frankfurt also taught at Yale University, Rockefeller University, and Ohio State University.

Frankfurt made significant contributions to fields like ethics and philosophy of mind.

The attitude of caring played a central role in his philosophy.

To care about something means to see it as important and reflects the person's character.

According to Frankfurt, a person is someone who has second-order volitions or who cares about what desires he or she has.

He contrasts persons with wantons.

Wantons are beings that have desires but do not care about which of their desires is translated into action.

In the field of ethics, Frankfurt gave various influential counterexamples, so-called Frankfurt cases, against the principle that moral responsibility depends on the ability to do otherwise.

His most popular book is On Bullshit, which discusses the distinction between bullshitting and lying.

Frankfurt was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1995.

He was a Visiting Fellow of All Souls College, Oxford University; he served as president, Eastern Division, American Philosophical Association; and he has received grants and fellowships from the Guggenheim Foundation, the Andrew Mellon Foundation and the National Endowment for the Humanities.

According to Frankfurt, a lot of the philosophical discourse concerns either the domain of epistemology, which asks what we should believe, or ethics, which asks how we should act.

He argues that there is another branch of inquiry that has received less attention, namely the question of what has importance or what we should care about.

An agent cares about something if he/she has a certain attitude of the will: He/she sees the entity in question as important to them.

For Frankfurt, what we care about reflects our personal character or who we are.

This also affects the person on the practical level concerning how he/she acts and leads his/her life.

In the academic literature, caring is often understood as a subjective attitude in contrast to importance as an objective factor.

On this view, the importance of something determines whether it is appropriate to care about it: people should care about important things but not about unimportant ones.

Frankfurt defends a different perspective on this issue by arguing that caring about something makes this thing important.

So when a person starts caring about something, this thing becomes important to them even if it was unimportant to them before.

Frankfurt explains this in terms of needs: the caring attitude brings with it a need.

Because of this need, the cared-for thing can affect the person's well-being and has thereby become important to them.

His 2005 book On Bullshit, originally published in 1986 as a paper on the concept of "bullshit", unexpectedly became a bestseller, which led to his making media appearances such as on Jon Stewart's late-night television program, The Daily Show.

In this work he explains how bullshitting is different from lying, in that it is an act that has no regard for the truth.

He argues that "It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction."

In 2006, he followed up with On Truth, a companion book in which he explored the dwindling appreciation in society for truth.

Among philosophers, he was for a time best known for his interpretation of Descartes's rationalism.

His most influential work, however, has been on freedom of the will (on which he has written numerous important papers ) based on his concept of higher-order volitions and for developing "Frankfurt cases" (also known as "Frankfurt counter-examples", which are thought experiments designed to demonstrate 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 this feature of the situation does not prevent that person from being morally responsible).

Frankfurt's view of compatibilism is perhaps the most influential version of compatibilism, developing the view that to be free is to have one's actions conform to one's more reflective desires.

Frankfurt's version of compatibilism is the subject of a substantial number of citations.

More recently, he wrote on love and caring in The Reasons of Love.

His major areas of interest included moral philosophy, philosophy of mind and action, and 17th-century rationalism.