Harry Frankfurt

Harry Gordon Frankfurt (born May 29, 1929) is a professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University. He previously taught at Yale University and Rockefeller University. He obtained his Ph.D. in 1954 at Johns Hopkins University. His major areas of interest include moral philosophy, philosophy of mind and action, and 17th century rationalism. He recently republished his 1986 paper On Bullshit, a philosophical look at "bullshit" and how it is both used and understood today. He appeared on Jon Stewart's The Daily Show on March 14 2005 to publicize his latest book.

Among philosophers Frankfurt is best known for his interpretation of Descartes's rationalism, for his account of freedom of the will based on his concept of higher-order volitions, and for developing what are known as "Frankfurt counterexamples", thought experiments in the philosophy of action designed to show the possibility of situations in which a person could not have done other than she did but in which, our intuition is to say that, she nonetheless chose freely.