Harry G. Frankfurt

Harry Gordon Frankfurt (born May 29, 1929) is an American philosopher. He is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University, where he taught from 1990 until 2002. Frankfurt has also taught at Yale University, Rockefeller University, and Ohio State University.

Frankfurt has made significant contributions to fields like ethics and philosophy of mind. The attitude of caring plays 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 they have. 

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 has given 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, among other things, the distinction between bullshitting and lying.

Frankfurt was born on May 29, 1929, in Langhorne, Pennsylvania. He obtained his B.A. in 1949 and Ph.D. in 1954 from Johns Hopkins University. He is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University. He 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 (1990—2002).

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 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 released a companion book, On Truth, which explores society's loss of appreciation 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 what are known as "Frankfurt cases" or "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 this feature of the situation does not prevent that person from being morally responsible).

Frankfurt is probably the leading living Humean compatibilist, developing Hume's view that to be free is to do what one wants to do. (Others who develop this view are David Velleman, Gary Watson, and John Martin Fischer.) Frankfurt's version of compatibilism is the subject of substantial literature by other philosophy professors. More recently, he has written on love and caring.

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