Harry g. frankfurt Quotes - QuotesSweet | quotesweet.com

Author: Harry G. Frankfurt
Quotes of Author: Harry G. Frankfurt

Harry G. Frankfurt _ On Bullshit
That is why she cannot be regarded as lying; for she does not presume that she knows the truth, and therefore she cannot be deliberately promulgating a proposition that she presumes to be false: Her statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true, not, as a lie must be, in a belief that it is not true. It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth - this indifference to how things really are - that I regard as the essence of bullshit.
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Harry G. Frankfurt _ On Inequality
from a moral point of view, economic equality does not really matter very much, and our moral and political concepts may be better focused on ensuring that people have enough.
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Harry G. Frankfurt _ On Bullshit
We may seek to distance ourselves from bullshit, but we are more likely to turn away from it with an impatient or irritated shrug than with the sense of violation or outrage that lies often inspire. The problem of understanding why our attitude towards bullshit is generally more benign than our attitude toward lying is an important one...
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Harry G. Frankfurt _ On Inequality
From the point of view of morality, it is not important everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.
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Harry G. Frankfurt _ On Inequality
From the point of view of morality, it is not important that everyone should have the same. What is morally important is that each should have enough.
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Harry G. Frankfurt _ On Bullshit
When we characterize talk as hot air, we mean that what comes out of the speaker's mouth is only that. It is mere vapor. His speech is empty, without substance or content. His use of language, accordingly, does not contribute to the purpose it purports to serve. No more information is communicated than if the speaker had merely exhaled. There are similarities between hot air and excrement, incidentally, which make hot air seem an especially suitable equivalent for bullshit. Just as hot air is speech that has been emptied of all informative content, so excrement is matter from which everything nutritive has been removed. Excrement may be regarded as the corpse of nourishment, what remains when the vital elements in food have been exhausted. {…} In any event, it cannot serve the purposes of sustenance, any more than hot air can serve those of communication.
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Harry G. Frankfurt _ The Importance of What We Care
What tends to go on in a bull session is that the participants try out various thoughts and attitudes in order to see how it feels to hear themselves saying such things and in order to discover how others respond, without it being assumed that they are committed to what they say. It is understood by everyone in a bull session that the statements people make do not necessarily reveal what they really believe or how they really feel. The main point is to make possible a high level of candor and an experimental or adventuresome approach to the subjects under discussion. Therefore provision is made for enjoying a certain irresponsibility, so that people will be encouraged to convey what is on their minds without too much anxiety that they will be held to it.
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Harry G. Frankfurt _ The Importance of What We Care
The point is rather that, so far as Wittgenstein can see, Pascal offers a description of a certain state of affairs without genuinely submitting to the constraints which the endeavor to provide an accurate representation of reality imposes. Her fault is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying.
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Harry G. Frankfurt _ The Importance of What We Care
So far as freedom is concerned, it is of course true that freedom is commonly understood to be a necessary condition of moral responsibility.
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Harry G. Frankfurt _ The Importance of What We Care
Morality, as I understand it, has to do particularly with how we ought to conduct ourselves in our relations with others.
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Harry G. Frankfurt _ The Importance of What We Care
Facts about ourselves are not peculiarly solid and resistant to skeptical dissolution. Our natures are, indeed, elusively insubstantial - notoriously less stable and less inherent than the natures of other things. And insofar as this is the case, sincerity itself is bullshit.
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Harry G. Frankfurt _ The Importance of What We Care
The contemporary proliferation of bullshit also has deeper sources, in various forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality and which therefore reject the possibility of knowing how things truly are. These "anti-realist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligibility of the notion of objective inquiry. One response to this loss of confidence has been a retreat from the discipline required by dedication to the ideal of correctness to a quite different sort of discipline, which is imposed by pursuit of an alternative ideal of sincerity.
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