And He Can Lift It, Too

The philosopher Harry Frankfurt died this week. He was unexpectedly famous for a bestselling book, On Bullshit, that originated as a playful academic essay only to find a second life as an editor’s marketing dream—a mischievous gift-book for the pseudo-intellectual in your life. It earned Harry an appearance on The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, and a lot of money.

This all happened after he’d retired from Princeton, having converted me from a budding metaphysician into a confused and ignorant action theorist too late to direct my dissertation—like a magician who performs one last inscrutable trick only to vanish in a puff of smoke, leaving his audience tormented by its secrets.

In truth, I’m not sure how he would have been as an advisor. Harry’s teaching style was efficient or lazy, depending on your point of view: in each seminar, he would pick two recent books in ethics to work through with students, and perhaps a co-instructor, over the course of a semester. Each class would begin wit…