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In Memoriam: Harry G. Frankfurt (1929-2023)

Brian Leiter

Professor Frankfurt, who was emeritus at Princeton University, also taught for many years at Yale University and, before that, at Rockefeller University and Ohio State University.  Early in his career, he wrote an influential book on Descartes, but was of course best-known in philosophy for seminal papers on free will.   The NYT obituary is here.  Comments are open for remembrances from those who knew Professor Frankfurt or for those who wish to comment on the significance of his work.  Please submit your comment only once, they may take awhile to appear.

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11 responses to “In Memoriam: Harry G. Frankfurt (1929-2023)”

  1. John Fischer

    Harry Frankfurt was a huge influence on me ever since I read his seminal JPhil papers in Michael Bratman's action theory class at Stanford some 50 years ago. (Note: I still haven't figured out the Frankfurt-Style Cases, at least to the satisfaction of most other contributors to this literature!). He was also a colleague of mine at Yale University, and we have kept in touch since then. He visited Riverside on various occasions, once teaching a Spinoza seminar here, and he lived right next to us on a little hill near campus. He used to watch "The West Wing" with my son, Ari, and Harry and I became good friends as the years went by.

    The influences of his work are many and significant. In my view, one important contribution was essentially a step in the direction initiated by Peter Strawson in "Freedom and Resentment," in which Strawson contended that we can analyze moral responsibility attributions/practices without recourse to any "metaphysical proposition" about free will. Arguably, his famous cases at least strongly suggest that moral responsibility does not require one kind of freedom, involving alternative possibilities (or freedom to do otherwise), but only another, an actual-sequence conception of "acting freely. This contribution has been resonant and has engaged many in heated debates for the 54 years since his 1969 paper was published. People still publish articles and books on these cases and their significance, and I plead guilty to this.

    His 1971 JPhil paper introduced a "hierarchical" model of acting freely, according to which one "identifies" with one's "will" by forming a second-order desire to act on the first-order desire that actually motivates one (one's will). Again, this has engaged and stimulated many action theorists and, more broadly, those working in philosophical psychology and moral philosophy. The influence of this paper has been enormous. In both of the papers I have mentioned, Harry doesn't necessarily present entirely new theses, but they are developed in extraordinarily precise and powerful ways.

    This is just to scratch the surface. Perhaps he has become most famous in the public at large for his paper and book, "On Bullshit." Again, it is beautifully written and has captured a "moment" in public life, leading to invitations to appear on Jon Stewart's Daily Show and other venues. It also sold a ton of copies.

    In every context, Harry was incisive, precise, and penetrating. He didn't waste words, and was totally unafraid to say or write things others might not have wanted to hear. He just didn't care about being "politically correct" or delicate (and perhaps took a certain delight in that). In my experience over the years, he was not always an easy friend, but eventually became a great friend. I have always deeply admired Harry, who will leave an indelible imprint on philosophy, and a big gap in the lives of those of us who love him.

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  2. Gideon Yaffe

    I will miss Harry very much. I remember he once said to me that the difference between dogs and cats is that while neither understand, dogs understand that there is something going on that they don't understand.

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  3. Matthew Kramer

    I was not acquainted personally with Harry Frankfurt, but I've greatly admired his writings for nearly half a century. I especially admire his work on equality and sufficiency, but every major book or article of his that I've read — from his early volume on Descartes to his hugely influential papers on moral responsibility and free will to his later books on love and bullshit and truth — is profoundly thought-provoking. He lived an exemplary philosophical life.

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  4. James Klagge

    I have an account of the Rockefeller Philosophy and Logic Programs here: http://jamesklagge.net/research/rockefeller.php
    It includes Frankfurt's account of his time with the program, and a brief summary of his work while there.

    Reply
  5. Rakesh Bhandari

    Frankfurt gave us a philosophy of the person that best allows us to understand how @shoshanazuboff's surveillance capitalism threatens it. Understand the person in terms of 1st and 2nd order desires.

    Surveillance capitalism can have us indulge our first-order desires such that we become a *wanton* through one-click shopping. But it can also play tricks with our 2nd-order desires. Take
    @brianchristian's example of a recovering alcoholic struggling to form new second order desires

    His 1st order desires are inconsistent with them, and he struggles to purify them to be consistent with his 2nd order conception of his sober personhood. But social media picks up on his micro-second hesitations with images of alcohol, tags him as a drinker.

    He is flooded with ads for alcohol until his new 2nd order conception is undermined and his autonomy effectively ruined.

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  6. Zena Hitz

    I have more Harry stories than I can tell! His wit and his blunt tongue were wonderful entertainment when I was a grad student. But more importantly, he and his work had a transformative effect on me. When I met him at Princeton I was already trained as a scholar in Greek philosophy. But I had not fully realized that I could use philosophy to think about my life or what t means to be a human being. He reflected so deeply on human interaction and motivation, such as one might observe in daily life, and with such sharpness and clarity. (I've imitated him ever since, with unfortunately only limited success.) He read advice columns, history, literature, everything, and it all went into the hopper in his search for clarity and understanding. He once told me that his main interest was "anthropology' or the study of human beings, and I still hold him up as a model of how to think in this way. My condolences to Joan and to his daughters. I am so grateful for his friendship, his teaching, and his work.

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  7. Hilary Kornblith

    I want to add to the account John Fischer offers of the importance of Frankfurt's ideas. Frankfurt's work on freedom of the will has important echoes in contemporary epistemology, and although Frankfurt himself did not point this out, and the epistemologists who echo Frankfurtian themes do not point it out either, the parallels are striking.
    Frankfurt argued that we are responsible for what we do, unlike other animals, because we are capable of reflecting on our desires and deciding which of them we wish to act upon. While other animals are simply moved by their first-order desires, we may stop to reflect on those desires, acting at times on the basis of this one, and, at other times, on the basis of that. It is this capacity which makes us persons, according to Frankfurt. It is what provides us with the possibility of freedom of the will. And it is in virtue of this capacity that we alone are responsible for what we do.
    Quite a number of epistemologists have argued that our capacity to reflect on our beliefs plays a similar role. Other animals have beliefs, but their beliefs are produced in them by automatic processes. We, on the other hand, sometimes stop to reflect on our beliefs and the reasons they provide. We deliberate about what to believe, and, at times, form beliefs on the basis of such self-conscious deliberation. In so doing, we are active in the process of belief formation, unlike other animals. And it is because we can play such an active role with respect to our beliefs that we may be held responsible for what we believe, unlike other animals. According to this line of thought, it is because of this that our beliefs are subject to normative assessment. They may be seen as justified or unjustified, rather than merely as reliably or unreliably formed. This line of thinking exactly parallels Frankurt's view of freedom of the will and the difference between human action and the actions of other animals.
    This is not a view that I am sympathetic with, but it is, undeniably, a powerful view which has much to recommend it. And it is a view which is very widely adopted by contemporary epistemologists. This is just one more illustration of the enormous power and fecundity of Frankfurt's work.

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  8. Peter Wendt

    Saddened by this news. I am only an amateur student of philosophy, but I did read all of Prof. Frankfurt's popular books, and learned of his stature through the coverage of "On Bullshit". His books helped me a lot; I only wish that I had known of his academic writings as well. Obviously, reading "On Bullshit" prepared me for the antics of Donald Trump. As in Rakesh Bhandari's comment above, Frankfurt's work can help me clarify my own response to, say, US politics and the power of Silicon Valley – in my own life, and in conversations with other people who have no interest in philosophy, but might feel overwhelmed by media coverage of the mess.

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  9. Steve Rothman

    I believe that Harry was responsible for the entry on "Doubt" in the old Encyclopedia of Philosophy. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Encyclopedia_of_Philosophy I'm not a philosopher but I loved reading his work, I can't follow everything, but much of his writings use plain english so that a thoughtful person can comprehend the meanings.

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  10. Dermot Moran

    When I was a graduate student at Yale in the mid nineteen seventies, I was a TA for Harry Frankfurt for his large-enrollment, undergraduate course ‘Introduction to Modern Philosophy’ (1976). At that time, Harry was best known for his 1970 book Demons, Dreamers and Madmen, a brilliant and original book on Descartes. In the course that I TA'd, his lectures were primarily on Descartes and Spinoza (as I recall) and he placed a lot of emphasis on the nature of the will. I found his lecturing style conversational, laconic, even laid-back. He was not a historical scholar in any conventional sense but he really got the students thinking about the meaning of rationality, motivation, freedom, necessity, and we really did not have the sense of doing 'history of philosophy' but rather engaging with living issues. Outside class, Harry was very witty, ironic and laconic. Of course, Yale Philosophy was going through some turmoil and he famously said that only a public sacrifice on the Old Campus Lawn outside Connecticut Hall could banish the ghosts that haunted the Department. I greatly enjoyed my exposure to him as an inspiring teacher. May he rest in peace,

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  11. Scott Carter

    I am grateful for these various pointers to Frankfurt's academic work, which I will dig into (I did already know about Frankfurt cases as an argument against the Principle of alternate possibilities). I too know him first and foremost for "On Bullshit", which I would hope would rank near if not at the top of the category of "popular applied philosophy" of any work since, I dunno, perhaps Hume?

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