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| On Bullshit | 
| Author: Harry G. Frankfurt
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Category: Book
List Price: $9.95
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Avg. Customer Rating:  175 reviews
Sales Rank: 9611
Media: Hardcover
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 80
Shipping Weight (lbs): 0.2
Dimensions (in): 6.1 x 4.1 x 0.5
ISBN: 0691122946
Dewey Decimal Number: 177.3
UPC: 218681122946
EAN: 9780691122946
ASIN: 0691122946
Publication Date: January 10, 2005
Availability: Usually ships in 1-2 business days
Condition: MINOR SCRATCHES ON COVER
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| Customer Reviews:
 the meaning of corporate life, unveiled December 18, 2006
1 out of 2 found this review helpful
I hear bullsh-- all the time, but I've never quite understood the term, or had the pleasure of a full-on analysis. Frankfurt posits that it's an action that is neither lying nor telling the truth, but rather of being vague and independent of any truth-values. The bullsh-tter will make a definite claim without any concern as to what the truth is. Moreover, we can't be sincere since we can't be determinate about anything: nothing about ourselves is definite and permanent, since we are always responding to others. You must bullsh-t in order to have others' respect, because if you are truthful, and reveal your human qualities of indeterminancy, then you are no longer useful in your apparent unreliableness. This book will help the bullsh-tter, namely everyone, understand on a fundamental level the nature of our bullsh-tting existence.
 An interesting distinction December 9, 2006
12 out of 19 found this review helpful
Let's say you were asked to divide the following 3 words into only 2 groups: truth; lie; bulls__t. Or, the words: truth-teller; liar; bulls__tter. I think most folks would put `truth' in one group, and `lie' and `bulls__t' in the other; at least I did when a friend asked me this question before lending me this delightful little book. The author persuaded me that the words `truth' AND `lie' should stand together and opposed to `bulls__t'.
If this grouping surprises or interests you, I expect you would enjoy this book; otherwise not. Warning: this book was written by a philosopher, so be prepared to put your thinking-cap on.
 From Lowbrow to Nobrow November 8, 2006
48 out of 78 found this review helpful
I was quite disappointed to find this "book"--pamphlet-sized, large fonts spreading out over sixty plus pages, roughly a paragraph per page--living up to its title. It is really no more than a glorified lecture from an established philosopher who, it would seem, has become big enough to pull a con job on his readers. In the end, Frankfurt takes all this time to reach the conclusion that BS is different from lying, in my opinion hardly worth the paper it's printed on. All in all, an inconsequential and not very entertaining analytical exercise by an emeritus academic with too much time on his hands. If you want to read a work that lives up to being called "entertaining" and "enlightening" you could try "From Lowbrow to Nobrow" (2006).
 Are American academics clinically insane? October 31, 2006
6 out of 24 found this review helpful
This brutal, vicious and in its title foul-mouthed little book presupposes that our society, and perhaps that of France too, has entirely too much "bullshit".
I would reply that it hasn't enough "bullshit" in the form of a public conversation.
Thomas E. Ricks, author of FIASCO: the American Military Adventure in Iraq, entitles his chapter on the run-up to the invasion of Iraq "The Silence of the Lambs", and he described a public conversation constricted at the top by a ban on unusual ideas, on wild-eyed proposals, on further bullshit investigation by the Blix team, on Saddam Husayn's "bullshit", even as Hannibal Lecter was able to carry out his mayhem in the titular book by the silence of good people...the fear, in other words, of having a prolix idea (where compassion is usually more verbose than its opposite) labeled "bullshit" by the Bush team.
3000 United States soldiers are dead. I hope members of the class who would chatter while The Rest of Us are silenced are happy. No more bullshit from them.
This nonbook, for nonreaders, is a species of gift book meant in the transaction as a brutal ideological statement. I was given a similar book in 2000 by a manager who happened to be quite intelligent, but was under higher pressure, entitled Who Moved My Cheese?
He said later it was a gag. But not really, of course, since the gift had to do the ideological work of reminding me who the rats were, who could move my cheese, and where I stood in Rat Central, below even him.
When a manager, or, here, an academic using the Imprimatur of Princeton University Press, it's not meant, and it is meant, "seriously"; it is and is not, like the cup named Mystery in Dosteoevsky's tale of the Grand Inquisitor.
The Sturmbateilung Arbeiter likewise had a lot of laughs when they beat up Jews and made them cry.
Fascism IS the successful attempt to, overnight, take over commanding heights of civil society, including prestigious universities and the presses bearing their name, and from those heights use a foul mouth to scorn and to belittle the use of that which makes us human, in order to strip us of our humanity.
Professor Frankfurt can kiss my Irish ass, if that's the level of language he's brought us to in the very title of this book. I read it for free, and I won't be reading On Truth.
On Bulls_it - The Fifth Element October 27, 2006
119 out of 141 found this review helpful
Cable news, politics, religion, advertising, entertainment, the ultimate answer to life, the universe, and everything - all are infused with the malodorous miasma of bulls_it - the real force that binds our galaxy together and allows popular culture as we know it to exist.
As a philosopher (popularly perceived as purveyors of elitist, academic bulls__it) Frankfurt is no bulls_itter himself (wink), and this deeply superficial treatise invokes St. Augustine, Pound, and Wittgenstein; superb examples of bulls_hit by citation. An insightfully outtasight postulate inclusively distinguishes bulls_it from other forms of humbug or puffery by contrasting "indifference to how things really are" (bulls_hit) with lying, which is by necessity false" - at least from a certain point of view. The bulls_it artist "does not reject the authority of the truth, as the liar does, and oppose himself to it. He pays no attention to it at all. By virtue of this, bulls_it is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are." Profound insight or execrable exegesis, paper or plastic. Deep thought is a stern duty imposed by a harsh, uncaring, universe.
Frankfort softly declaims that the rise of bulls_it has been assisted by "forms of skepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality." He also notes that "the production of bulls_it is stimulated whenever a person's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts" - an observation summarizing the rise of neo-conservative and fundamentalist bulls_it.
Heaping piles of bulls_it are also investigated - a "contemporary proliferation" is noted even as the author confesses that he can't assume that the "incidence is actually greater now." Even 19 years ago, when this book was written, "The realms of advertising and of public relations, and the nowadays closely related realm of politics, are replete with instances of bulls_it so unmitigated," he writes, "that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept." - all of this before Karl Rove and the shrub burst upon the scene.
Unfortunately a quantitative vs. qualitative analysis of bulls_it eludes the author's grasp. Currently available logical, mathematical, philosophical, and scientific tools are presented with intractable challenges when asked to evaluate the relative bulls_it of "Hannity and Colmes" vis-a-vis the "O'Reilly Factor." Theology, the ur-disciple of bulls_hit is especially blind and helpless. Where would Frankfurt put President Bush's claims about Iraq's weapons of mass destruction: is he an "honest man" (bulls_it alert), a "liar," or the accomplished bulls_itter who "does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly?" Throwing quotes around is cerebrally-correct, but any real bulls_itter must answer the big questions.
"On Bulls_it" is short, sweet (if not smelling), and apropos - the most profound examples of bulls_it usually go unnoticed, but not this one. In describing bulls_it Frankfurt's missive becomes bulls_it; sophistry in the service of philosophy as bulls_it is to truth. Should be required reading for anyone old enough to vote. And yes this entire review is bulls_it, except for every last word.
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