{"id":26758,"date":"2023-07-18T12:02:32","date_gmt":"2023-07-18T17:02:32","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=26758"},"modified":"2023-07-18T12:02:32","modified_gmt":"2023-07-18T17:02:32","slug":"obit-watch-july-18-2023","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/?p=26758","title":{"rendered":"Obit watch: July 18, 2023."},"content":{"rendered":"

Harry G. Frankfurt<\/a>, philosopher and author.<\/p>\n

Professor Frankfurt\u2019s major contribution to philosophy was a series of thematically interrelated papers, written from the 1960s through the 2000s, in which he situated the will \u2014 people\u2019s motivating wants and desires \u2014 at the center of a unified vision of freedom, moral responsibility, personal identity and the sources of life\u2019s meaning. For Professor Frankfurt, volition, more than reason or morality, was the defining aspect of the human condition.<\/a>
\nDespite the ambition and inventiveness of this project \u2014 the philosopher Michael Bratman praised it as \u201cpowerful and exciting philosophy\u201d of great \u201cdepth and fecundity\u201d \u2014 Professor Frankfurt became best known for a single, irreverent paper largely unrelated to his life\u2019s main work.<\/a>
\nThe paper, written in the mid-1980s under the same title as his eventual book, discussed what to his mind was a pervasive but underanalyzed feature of our culture: a form of dishonesty akin to lying but even less considerate of reality. Whereas the liar is at least mindful of the truth (if only to avoid it), the \u201cbullshitter,\u201d Professor Frankfurt wrote, is distinguished by his complete indifference to how things are.<\/a>
\nWhether its purveyor is an advertiser, a political spin doctor or a cocktail-party blowhard, he argued, this form of dishonesty is rooted in a desire to make an impression on the listener, with no real interest in the underlying facts. \u201cBy virtue of this,\u201d Professor Frankfurt concluded, \u201cbullshit is the greater enemy of truth than lies are.\u201d<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

That paper was republished as a book in 2005, On Bullshit<\/a><\/strong> (affiliate link), which became a best-seller. He also wrote On Truth<\/a><\/strong> (affiliate link) which seems to have been less successful.<\/p>\n

Bold and daring in his ideas, Professor Frankfurt was somewhat aloof in style, with a dry wit and a strenuous aversion to pomposity. When asked what had inspired his interest in Descartes, the subject of his first book, \u201cDemons, Dreamers, and Madmen\u201d (1970), he admitted that he had liked that Descartes\u2019s books were short.<\/a><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

For the record, and because Lawrence<\/a> sent over an obit: Jane Birkin<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Over the weekend, my mother asked me: “How do you go from being a promising young journalist to being a swami?” I don’t have a good answer for that, but here’s the obit for Sally Kempton<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Robert Lieberman<\/a>, director. Other credits<\/a> include quite a few genre TV series, “Christmas in Tahoe”, “All I Want for Christmas”, and “Will: The Autobiography of G. Gordon Liddy”.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Harry G. Frankfurt, philosopher and author. Professor Frankfurt\u2019s major contribution to philosophy was a series of thematically interrelated papers, written from the 1960s through the 2000s, in which he situated the will \u2014 people\u2019s motivating wants and desires \u2014 at the center of a unified vision of freedom, moral responsibility, personal identity and the sources […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[4,22,31,16,174,29],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-26758","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-media","category-movies","category-obits","category-religion","category-tv"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26758","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=26758"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26758\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":26760,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/26758\/revisions\/26760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=26758"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=26758"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.sportsfirings.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=26758"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}