I took a philosophy class my freshman year of undergrad where we read his book "On Bullshit". Very memorable experience that made it clear (especially to a young person) that philosophy could be fun, enlightening, written in understandable language, and about "anything" without pretension. It's been years since I last read it and am still inclined to recommend his work based on the positive experience I had. Sad to hear this news.
I enjoyed "On Bullshit" but I would much more emphatically recommend Frankfurt's "The Reasons of Love," [0] the basic argument of which is that self-love has been wrongly maligned in our society.
Here's a taste:
> Insofar as a person loves himself — in other words, to the extent that he is volitionally wholehearted — he does not resist any movements of his own will. He is not at odds with himself; he does not oppose, or seek to impede, the expression in practical reasoning and in conduct of whatever love his self-love entails. He is free in loving what he loves, at least in the sense that his loving is not obstructed or interfered with by himself.
I mention Harry Frankfurt every time I discuss ChatGPT because of his explanation that a bullshitter is more dangerous than the liar.
As On Bullshit explains, there’s the truth teller who is only concerned with the truth. The liar who tells the opposite of the truth, and thus must know the truth. Finally the bullshitter who neither cares about the truth or lies but rather the appearance of truth. He could be telling the truth, he could be lying, and he doesn’t care as long as you believe him.
Frankfurt is maybe best known outside academia for On Bullshit, but also did some accessible and thought-provoking work on free will and compatibilism that folks may find interesting. Unfortunately the key papers do not seem to be freely accessible, but https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/compatibilism/ gives at least an overview of some of his ideas.
I read his book “On Bullshit” last year and I don’t think I’ve ever seen the concept described so astutely today. You will be missed Mr. Frankfurt. You have helped me cope with the amount of bullshit that goes on in the world and the constant bullshit that people aren’t even aware of when they are bullshitting.
More scholars should write in his vein. Academics who write exclusively for other academics (especially in more abstract disciplines like philosophy) often seem more interested in winning arguments about the right way to split hairs than providing their readers with anything useful (even at the risk of being found wrong later). There's a style of moral philosophy that dresses itself in the inevitability of mathematics or pure logic while constructing soaring theoretical edifices on bog-like foundations.
Yes, I'm fond of that too. A problem I have with much of modern analytic philosophy is that while it nominally addresses this question, it's often policy advocacy in pseudo-objective wrapping. I've got books which have interesting ideas and whose propositions I largely agree with, but which would have been better off as an earnestly argued 10 page essay instead of a lumbering and tedious 150 page apologia.
There's a loooong history of philosophy-as-political-advocacy, going back to Plato's Republic, and arguably before. Not just in the Western tradition either --- 孔夫子 (Kǒng Fūzǐ, a/k/a Master Kong, a/k/a Confucius) comes notably to mind. al-Kindi, Avicenna, Averroes, Ibn Khaldun , Machiavelli, Moore, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau.
And not just the overt stuff either, but a whole slew of religious philosophy, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics, and more.
I'm fine with that, it's the turgid pseudoscientific style of argument I have an issue with. I'm tired of reading stuff like 'Question X has been neglected since the Rawlsian turn. In this work I propose a method for inscribing a Zizekian comparator within a Derridiean framework, allowing us to navigate a Bordieu-Bataille field...' That's a pastiche, but I have a shelf's worth of such badly written theory which seems to mistake density for depth.
Stugeon's Law holds. There's also the whole publishing / academic clique environment which incentivizes such styles. And there are refreshingly clear and accessible authors in philosophy from both the present time and the past. I've been following a number of podcasts for a few years now which tend to be both reasonably high quality and quite listenable: Peter Adamson's History of Philosophy, Stephen West's Philsophize This, a set of podcasts each from Nigel Warburton nd David Edmunds (Philosophy Bites, Philosophy Sites, and a few more) and David Runciman (Talking Politics, History of Ideas, Past Present Future, etc.). Bertrand Russell's History of Western Philosophy and Will Durant's Story of Philosophy are also engaging.
A number of these are surveys of philosophy rather principle works, but there's at least work in the genre that's readable.
"On Inequality" is one of the very worst pieces of serious analytic philosophy I have ever read. The best part of Franfurt's intellectual tradition -- analytic philosophy -- is taking ideas seriously, and so to honor his life I'll try to make a brief but serious critique of "On Inequality".
This book essentially concatenates two essays, "Economic Equality as a Moral Ideal", and "Equality and Respect". In the first essay, Frankfurt argues that economic equality is less important than the worst-off having enough. As a result, political appeals to the importance of equality are bad philosophy. In "Equality and Respect", he generalises this to a general attack on the concept of egalitarianism.
The basic problem with his work is that the social world is so incredibly abstracted that the truth value of his claims is simply irrelevant -- they have no insight to offer about our actual world. In his essay, he considers different distributions of resources, but gives no serious thought to the actual mechanics of how resources are distributed.
This is fatal to his argument because resource actual distributions are endogenous, rather than exogenous, and so they can't be compared in a vacuum -- to say something meaningful, you genuinely have to take seriously the fact that control of resources is a form of power, and that the powerful tend to use their power to reinforce and maintain their status. So politics and policy -- things he explicitly denies having anything to say about -- are fundamental to understanding the issues involved.
Even making the tiniest possible effort towards taking these issues seriously blows up his argument. For example, suppose that we have people living in a perfectly competitive market. This is about the smallest possible step towards social realism that you can possibly take!
But even here, Negishi's theorem tells us that at a Walrasian equilibrium, the implicit social welfare function maximises the sums of each person's utility, scaled by the inverse of each person's marginal utility of wealth. Now, suppose our people have a utility function which is logarithmic in their wealth -- U(w) = log(w). Then their marginal utility U'(w) = 1/w, and the inverse of that is w. That is, ideal markets value individuals linearly in proportion to their wealth. So the utility function of the ideal market says that saving Jeff Bezos's life is worth the lives of 1.2 million Americans of median wealth, 8 million Poles, or 36 million Indians.
It makes one think that Frankfurt must have used "On Bullshit" as an instruction manual when writing "On Inequality".
What had stuck in my mind when I'd read of his work some years back was his idea of "second order desires", wanting to have the desire for X even if you don't have the desire for X (e.g. for healthy food), and how having these second order desires can be seen as a form of free will--without second order desires, you are simply driven by your first order desires (like an animal).
Just googled it for a refresher and found this[1] comprehensive but readable explanation of the above idea. The obituary refers to it briefly as well.
