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Frankfurt's Bull Session on "Bull----" Philosophy professor Harry G. Frankfurt, of Princeton and other universities, has recently published a small hardcover book, "On Bull----" with a title that this present author refuses to spell it out in full. (This reviewer had the experience of going to a Borders bookstore and seeing the book placed in a high-profile area where children could see it, with its title on the cover and all.) Couldn't the book have been called "On Dishonesty" or, "On Verbal Hustling" or something instead of "On Bull----"?) And, in any case, is Frankfurt's little work (c. 80 pages) a species of what it claims to condemn, as other Amazon reviewers have noted? In essence, what the book says, as this reviewer understands it, is that bull---- (a frequent phenomenon these days) may be even worse than lying, since bull----ting shows one doesn't even care if one's telling the truth or not, and may also reflect a modernistic and nihilistic lack of confidence that there is an objective reality. (Why it would take an entire book to say this is another question.) One must at least credit Frankfurt for noting that characteristics of bull---- are "lack of connection to a concern with truth", and also being "__phony__". Apparently, then, he does decry apathy-about-truth, and also decries phoniness, as indeed any philosophy professor worth his bread and butter should. That's not all, though; on analysis, things start to get interesting. Harry Frankfurt (also seemingly known as "Henry G. Frankfurt" back when he published "Demons, Dreamers and Madmen: The Defense of Reason in Descarte's [sic] Meditations") seems to have omitted any mention that "On Bull----" is in large part work done no later than 1988, when an essay of the same name, "On Bull----", was published in the collection "The Importance of What We Care About: Philosophical Essays by Harry G. Frankfurt". At this point, a quick look at another part of 1988's "The Importance of What We Care About" might be instructive. Frankfurt says there, of equality, that "What is important from the moral point of view is not that everyone should have the same but that each should have enough. If everyone had enough, it would be of no moral consequence whether some had more than others." Who decides what is "enough", though? What about problems of envy, power, unease (e.g., the time spent in wondering and investigating why one should have more than another), or, believe it or not, simple injustice? (Cf. the Declaration of Independence: "All men are created equal.") Frankfurt's near-namesake, the legal "hot dog" and U.S. Supreme Court justice Felix Frankfurter, himself had questions about equality: for example, he asked his future fellow justice, Thurgood Marshall, during _Brown v. Board of Education_ arguments, what Marshall meant by "equal," whereupon Marshall replied, "Equal means getting the same thing, at the same time, and in the same place." Eventually, Justice Frankfurter, despite his questions about equality, supported Marshall in the _Brown_ case and voted for desegregation, apparently deciding that "equality" is a better standard than merely "enough". In that light, Harry Frankfurt's stated ideas on equality become more puzzling. The above commentary, on equality, is not a diversion but an illustration; it lets us see the track of Frankfurt's philosophy. How it reflects on "On Bull----" is up to readers of this review, but this reviewer felt readers should have some of Frankfurt's other work for comparison. --The disturbing closing words of "On Bull----" are that "...sincerity itself is bull----." While Frankfurt apparently means that mere sincerity is no substitute for following objective reality (e.g., Frankfurt could have noted that the 9/11 suicide bombers were maybe "sincere", but severely deluded), his work should have emphasized that both attention-to-facts AND sincerity are important, as common sense should dictate. In sum: "On Bull----", old wine in new bottle, may not be completely valueless, but for someone of Harry G. Frankfurt's supposed stature, it deserves at most one star, maybe half a star. Instead of something deep, like the Hindu laws of Manu, we get merely the laws of manure, and in a version which raises questions it may not have meant to raise.