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For a brief period in 2005, Harry Frankfurt, then recently retired as a professor at Princeton University, attracted public attention on a scale unimaginable to most academic philosophers. The reason for his appearances on Jon Stewart’s Daily Show, CBS’s 60 Minutes and other US network TV programmes was On Bullshit, his brief but bestselling disquisition on what he described as “one of the most salient features of our culture”.
Frankfurt had first published On Bullshit as a paper in the journal Raritan almost 20 years before Princeton University Press decided to issue it in book form. The crux of his argument was a distinction between the bullshitter and the liar. Unlike the liar, who must keep the truth in view in order to concoct his lie, Frankfurt argued that the bullshitter is altogether indifferent to the truth. The “essence of bullshit”, he wrote, “is not that it is false, but that it is phony”. (In 2016, Frankfurt suggested that Donald Trump, then a candidate for the US presidency, was both an accomplished liar and a bullshitter.)
Harry Gordon Frankfurt, who has died at the age of 94, was born David Bernard Stern in Langhorne, Pennsylvania, in May 1929. Shortly afterwards, in circumstances that always remained murky to him, he was adopted by Nathan and Bertha Frankfurt, who renamed him. He was their only child.
Frankfurt’s adoptive father worked as a telegrapher in a stock brokerage office. He lost his job after the stock market crash of 1929 and went on to endure long periods of unemployment as the Great Depression took hold, leaving him, his son later recalled, “chronically anxious about money”.
But, despite the household’s financial privations, Frankfurt’s adoptive mother, a piano teacher whose father had been a scholar of sorts, was intellectually ambitious for him. “I was to be conscientiously prepared to follow a career either as a concert pianist or as a rabbi.”
Talent, or lack of it, was a barrier to the first vocation, while the young Frankfurt was implacably opposed to the second. He hated being sent to Hebrew school, and said that the “elevated hogwash” his teachers imparted there had sensitised him to the “offensive prevalence . . . of bullshit”.
After an undergraduate degree in philosophy at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, from where he graduated in 1949, and a PhD awarded by the same institution in 1954, he persuaded his parents that becoming a professor might be a plausible alternative.
While doing his graduate studies, Frankfurt spent a couple of years at Cornell University, which then had what was reckoned to be one of the country’s leading philosophy departments. There he met, briefly, the great Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, who left a profound impression on him. He “shone somehow”, Frankfurt remembered, “with a . . . nearly incandescent light”.
He was drafted into the US army for two years before getting his first job, at Ohio State University. There he began studying the work of the 17th-century French philosopher René Descartes, labour that eventually led to the publication of his first book, Demons, Dreamers, and Madmen in 1970. (The logician Willard Van Orman Quine had warned him against choosing such a “frivolous or light-hearted” title, but Frankfurt cheerfully resisted “this mature and wisely sober recommendation”.)
After marrying Marilyn Rothman in 1960 (they later divorced after having two daughters), Frankfurt left Ohio in 1962. He spent an unhappy year at the State University of New York at Binghamton (“a rather dismal place, in an extremely unappealing location”). Eventually he pitched up at the Rockefeller Institute (later Rockefeller University) in New York City, which is where he cemented his professional reputation with papers on moral responsibility and freedom of the will.
Frankfurt rejected the so-called principle of alternative possibilities, according to which a person is morally responsible for their actions only if they could have done otherwise. He argued, with the aid of some ingenious counter-examples (philosophers today still refer to “Frankfurt-style cases”), that a morally responsible agent need not have an alternative to acting as they do. It’s enough that “what he does be something . . . which he really wants to do”.
In a 2010 lecture looking back on his career, Frankfurt concluded, with disarming candour, that it had been “rather long and middling”. The problem, he said, is that philosophy, done properly, is hard. “The effort necessary for doing philosophy conscientiously over an extended period of time . . . has generally been too much for me.”
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