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Welcome into the podcast Revise and Resubmit. This is Weekend Classics. 🎙️📚
Today we are diving into a razor-sharp little book with a big bite: On Bullshit by Harry Gordon Frankfurt, published in 2005 after its first life as a 1986 essay, brought to bookshelves by Princeton University Press. 🧠✨
Listen to this. The title makes you grin. The argument makes you flinch. The prose makes you nod. Then it makes you think again. That is why we are here. This is a book review, and I am holding a slim volume that teaches like a heavyweight.
Frankfurt sets a simple trap and invites us to step in. He separates lying from the thing he calls bullshit. A liar knows the truth and rejects it. A bullshitter shrugs at truth and aims only to persuade. One is a duel with facts. The other is a fog machine. 🌫️
How does he prove it? With patient definitions. With crisp logic. With a story that passes through Wittgenstein like a bright flare. Not wrong, Wittgenstein says. Just careless with accuracy. In a world that rewards hot takes, Frankfurt argues we drift from accuracy to sincerity, from evidence to performance, and the cost is truth itself. That indifference, he warns, is more dangerous than a lie, because it erodes our ability to care what is real. 📖🔥
Let me pause on the man behind the pages. Harry Gordon Frankfurt was an American philosopher with a career that reads like a corridor of thinking rooms. Professor emeritus at Princeton University from 1990 to 2002. Earlier chapters at Yale University, Rockefeller University, and Ohio State University. He wrote with a teacher’s ear and a watchmaker’s patience, and this little book clicks with that exacting rhythm. 🎓⏱️
So here we are, in Weekend Classics, where small books can change big habits. I am not here to scold your timeline. I am here to sharpen your filter. I want sentences that stand up straight. I want claims that can be checked. I want voices that care if they are right. And I want to read with you, out loud, until the fog lifts. 🗣️🔎
Thank you, Harry Gordon Frankfurt, and thank you, Princeton University Press. 🙏
If you enjoyed this, hit follow on Spotify, subscribe to our YouTube channel Weekend Researcher, and find us on Amazon Prime Music and Apple Podcast. ⭐🔔🎧
Here is my question for you as we begin: when you speak today, will you serve the audience, the argument, or the truth?
Reference
Frankfurt, H. G. (1986, 2025). On bullshit. Princeton University Press. https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691276786/on-bullshit
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