Harry Frankfurt

In this paper, I will investigate Harry Frankfurt’s arguments and discuss his concepts concerning freewill and determinism as presented in "Freedom of Will and the Concept of Person". Frankfurt presents as well as makes justifiable assertions on several of his arguments, however a few of his reasoning seem to be problematic. I will argue that his arguments are not cogent and are shown to be contradictory. Additionally, I will demonstrate that we are not caused to have freewill or to be free as well as illustrate how his claims on the relationship between freewill and moral responsibility contravenes each other. Frankfurt begins by introducing several crucial definitions. He defines the term ‘first-order desires’ as a desire to act or do…

On Bullshit is a 1986 essay written by Princeton University professor Harry Frankfurt in which he attempts to define the idea of bullshit and explain the cultural use and context behind it. Using a variety of sources, including the Oxford English Dictionary as well as other older essays, Frankfurt examines the use of the term bullshit and how it simply cannot be replaced with another word, especially “lie”. Frankfurt begins by stating that, “…we have no theory,” or any other formal writing on…

The second philosopher is Harry Frankfurt, whose ideas are similar to those of David Hume. Frankfurt has two ways in which he views how to be a person. The first is being moved by volitional necessity and how to have free wills. Frankfurt's views on how to have a free will starts with animals in Freedom of the will and the concept of a person, by Frankfurt. Animals can only have first order desires, which are represented as X. Then there are humans who want first order desires, X, but also want…

In other words, what “we” as humans hold to be true. As humans we like to assimilate and stick together, so in relation to this logic. If we call a mouse a mouse, it is in fact a mouse, because we all know it to be a mouse. Therefore, using Nietzsche’s argument when we a species call something “Truth” it is because we gave it Truth. So, to sum up, truth is something that is relative and capital Truth is something that we know to be True. With this logic in place, a lie can easily be seen as…

While the purpose of lying is to distract from the truth, bullshitting, as Harry Frankfurt describes in his essay On Bullshit, stands in its own class. Bullshit is a technique politicians and others use to sway the masses that disregards reality entirely. It occurs whenever someone makes a statement without considering “how things really are,” in Frankfurt’s terms. Throughout his political career, President Donald Trump has often ignored objective facts in favor of promoting bullshit, which his…

Frankfurt and Free Will within Addicts In “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of A Person”, Harry Frankfurt makes the argument that individuals lack moral responsibility for an action if one could not have done otherwise. Frankfurt uses the examples of three addicts: the willing, non-willing and wanton addicts to make his argument that having free will exists if one has identified with their desires. I will argue that Frankfurt’s argument is plausible because having free will may depend on the…

we still might assign moral responsibility to a moral agent who may have committed the wrong action because of, and not in spite of, the coercive force. By the same token, if we imagine this experiment to depict a genuine case of coercion, then we are tacitly admitting that cases of genuine coercion do not exclude one from moral responsibility. Either way, we are in some sense obliged to admit that the issue of moral responsibility cannot be completely contingent upon a moral agent’s ability…

The “U.S. Kitchen Incubators an Industry Snapshot” article gave the reader an idea of the purpose and differences of shared kitchens/incubators. The purpose of a shared kitchen/incubator is to give an entrepreneur who needs a commercial kitchen the opportunity to have access to one. The food industry is very regulated and many places require for wholesale food products to be prepped in a licensed commercial kitchen. Presently there are 135 shared kitchen facilities in the United States and due…

In 2001, Michael Haneke directed a film called, The Piano Teacher. Haneke’s view, as conveyed to the viewer, is not to rail against pornography, per se, but to rail against its impact as generated by a capitalist-patriarchal society. This stems from a similar modality of thinking introduced by Linda Williams in 1989, in which she “...moves beyond the impasse of the anti-porn/anti-censorship debate to analyze what hard-core film pornography is and does…” (Slade 656). Haneke’s method is…

The culture industry argument, established by Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, is a critique of mass media, which refers to the industrialization of culture, where the masses are not the only source of mass culture; capitalism serves the masses, and treats them like commodities for their own benefit (McAnany & Wilkinson, 1996). Adorno and Horkheimer chose to call it culture industry, rather than mass media, because they believed that in mass media, masses had some influence upon the creation…