Šūdas. Čia šūdas, ne knyga. Pinigų švaistymas visiems:

1) valstybei (per kultūros tarybą finansuotas leidimas);
2) spaustuvei (kodėl reikėjo ~2000 žodžių ilgio esė sudėti į „knygą“, su 30 pt dydžio šriftu, lyg būtų skirta vaikučiams, dvigubais ar trigubais tarpais tarp eilučių, vidutiniškai 20 žodžių per puslapį!?);
3) pirkėjams (nes čia net ne apie šūdmalą kūrinys!).

Paskutinė dalis papiktino mane labiausiai. Šūdmala lietuvių kalboje tipiškai yra ne šūdo, nesąmonių kalbėjimas, o kažkokio veiksmo darymas (tipiškai prastai, beprasmiškai). Dėl to pavadinimas tiesiog meluoja. Meluoja ir visas knygos turinys.

Žodžiu, jei įdomi filosofija apie blevyzgas, pezalus - neskaitykite šios knygos, nes yra kitų ir yra geresnių, tikrų knygų, ne tokių kūrybiškų lėšų įsisavinimų.
O jei įdomi filosofija apie darbą ir jo prasmę - tuo labiau neskaitykite.

Aš papiktintas. :-D

“On Bullshit” is a short academic essay packaged into a small hardcover, published in 2005, before the current iteration of political discourse.

I worried this about Bush as I now do Trump: Is he a pathological liar? Is he crazy? Is he stupid? Is he just a bullshitter?

Frankfurt is a bit helpful here in making a distinction between lying and bullshit:

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.”

Humbug. Balderdash. Claptrap. Hokum. Quackery. Drivel.

“Never tell a lie when you can bullshit your way through”—E. Ambler

In the end he also says all claims to sincerity are bullshit, which would include his essay, a claim about which I agree. I didn’t know what to expect exactly when I began reading it, but I didn’t expect it to be so flat and scholarly and dull. I was hoping for more laughs, which we all need in this Time of Remarkable Bullshit.

Thanks to Michael for posting Frankfurt’s 2016 Time Magazine article on Trump and bullshit:

https://time.com/4321036/donald-trump...

“Everybody Knows,” Leonard Cohen:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Lin-a...

I was wondering how this book ever got published but then I read the "About the Author" section. Turns out Harry Frankfurt is a "renowned moral philosopher." I didn't know I was reading a renowned moral philosopher. I'm guessing he went to the publishers and was all like, "I'm a renowned moral philosopher, bitches, and I got this here essay on bullshit. Now are you gonna publish it or am I gonna have to get all categorically imperative on your asses. Respeck." I can't explain this book's existence in any other way.

n  In this paper, we distinguish three important classes of dishonesty that can occur in multi-agent systems, as well as in human society. In particular, the distinction is being made between lies and bullshit, following the work of Harry Frankfurt. The difference is that someone who tells a lie has access to the truth, whereas the concept of bullshit requires no knowledge of the truth at all. That is, the liar knows that what he says is not true, whereas the bullshitter has no proper knowledge to support the statements he or she is making. (Martin Caminada, University of Luxembourg).n

Before I read this essay, I had no idea who Harry Frankfurt was and it wasn’t until I had done some research last night before beginning this book that I found out that he’s a renowned moral philosopher and realized He is professor emeritus of philosophy at Princeton University and has previously taught at Yale University and Rockefeller University.

So the tiny hardback that I had initially purchased had been because of the title and I thought that it would prove to be amusing. I wouldn’t really call this book amusing but it made me think, and thus when reasoning came into the equation, the book thus took me far longer to read.

I always thought that “bullshit” was on a par with “lying” and “bull” but obviously that’s not the case and as for “humbug”? I must confess that I haven’t really thought about it. Basically don’t they all deal with some form of nonsense? One can just sail through life with vocabulary and actually be unaware of the true essence of words.

I can give you an example of what I perceived to be bullshit at the time. I have a brother, Roy, who is eleven years older than me. He’s indeed a bullshitter and known for it by our family and all of his friends. I recall when I was about ten he took me out in his car through the countryside, as he was en route to his girlfriend Sue. My mother had insisted that I went along. Was I some kind of junior chaperone? When we arrived at Sue’s home, I was given a book to read and stayed in the lounge on my own for about two hours. What did they get up to?

Well we passed some cows in the field on the left and Roy laughed. “Guess what Lynne? I was following a mini the other day and it came to this exact spot. It then suddenly flipped over the hedge and landed on top of a cow”! I ask you. It’s nonsense I know but is that bullshit, bull or humbug ? I knew that it was fanciful and did Roy make me laugh. I never could find out though what had happened to the cow or the car.

I realize that philosophers are searching for wisdom and enlightenment but it is really all down to interpretation and the thought processes are all so different. I didn’t have too much of a problem with Descartes as I read him at university and also Seneca but when it gets to Roger Scruton; he is way above me in his thinking process.

So this book, although thoroughly enjoyable, I wondered, when I arrived at a reference to Wittgenstein, how I would react to him. He evidently detested any form of “nonsense” which actually rather amused me and so I could certainly appreciate how he would relate to a comment made by Fania Pascal, who had known him at Cambridge in the thirties:

I had my tonsils out and was in the Evelyn Nursing Home feeling sorry for myself. Wittgenstein called. I croaked “I feel just like a dog that has been run over.”’ He was disgusted: “You don’t what a dog that has been run over feels like.”

It makes one wonder though if what Fania said was true or was Wittgenstein joking or trying to joke anyway? Difficult really to determine without knowing the facts.

I don’t think that I could have handled a much larger book than this but this was definitely good as a taster and sometimes tasters are the best things in life.

Thanks Rakhi for enticing me with your somewhat brief review.

"...Sincerity itself is bullshit."
Though I should point out that I'm not a "Frankfurtist" as I disagree with his main theories on the matter of free will, But I like his style. His style of logical argumentation is to some extent precise which is much appreciated in the age of continental philosopher (or as I call them, lazy-ass-dramatic-claimer). Also, his style of writing is fun, elegant and rather enjoyable to read.
I would recommend reading this essay to almost anyone who has time for 64 pages of reading.

I hate to say this... but this book was sad. It was a C+ college paper at best, where the topic had potential and the author failed to go anywhere or make any reasonable conclusions, or really, even come to a deinition of Bullshit (and the part about men bullshitting and women henning was SUCH a stretch and I think was contradictory to the rest of the "argument")... He compares it to humbug, but not to exaggeration, and then pulls the most irrelevant literary topics to be discussed.

If you really want to read it, download it. The book is barely bigger than my palm and still less than 100 pages.

and PS, the summary of this book is much better than the book. If it were written like the above it would have been more interesting.

This was a quick read. Frankfurt starts by explaining why Bullshit has become so rampant. He blamed the proliferation of bullshit on the growing level of scepticism towards realistic knowledge of facts or evidence. This scepticism, he argues, has made people increasingly disinterested in identifying facts, and even falsehood.

As a concept, bullshit is difficult to explain succinctly. Because there's no universally accepted meaning of the word. Furthermore, what bullshit represent is difficult to pinpoint especially because there are myriad of words or phrases in use that seems to be confused with Bullshit. But Frankfurt did a wonderful job by explaining and comparing and contrasting Bullshit with such confusing terms like lying, humbug, bluffing, etc. Bullshitting is faking things. The bullshitter makes general claims with an intended falsehood rather than being particular. The bullshit art is about misrepresenting oneself with the intention to deceive his listener to gain a specific purpose. The person telling a bullshit knows the listener is disinterested in the truth or the falsehood, so the intent is to achieve a general purpose of deception.

When setting out to read a scholarly philosophical work on the nature of "bullshit," I expected some degree of humor. But I thought that this humor would solely come from the process of reading a boring essay where I happen to get to read the word bullshit regularly. But this essay was funny, like really really funny. At first I thought it was unintentional, but as I went along I started thinking that it was just too perfectly crafted to be unintentional humor. And yet, at the same time, Frankfurt elucidates a really import feature of human communication. The conceptual issues surrounding the nature of bullshit end up being far more important than you ever imagined.

This was a fantastic little book, and I promise, I'm not bullshitting you when I say that.

“It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction.”

Here is a small book that starts out with a social-linguistic comparison between hogwash and bullshit (or something like that. It's been a few months since I've read it.) and moves swiftly into an assessment of the liar's relationship to truth in comparison to the bullshiter's. In the end, Frankfurt posits that a liar knows what is true (or thinks they do, or has at least some respect for the concept of truh) and intentionally, for a specific purpose, corrupts the truth, either occasionally or frequently, whereas the bullshitter cares not an ounce about truth but only about dodging questions altogether and manipulating every situation towards the creation of a certain image and, to put it succinctly, conning us all.

Sound familiar?

Yep, a good book to read around inauguration day. Short, sweet, to the point, chillingly timely. We live inside a three stooges episode stuffed inside a Kafka nightmare stuffed inside...a turkey? With a band of so-called politicians (with no experience as such, but much experience with bullying and other violences, stealing, slithering, and giving zero fucks about anything but the obsessive accrual of wealth and power) who have so little respect for truth or institutional checks and balances they seem to be disintegrating our entire democracy with their vague laser eyes and vaporous rhetorical stances.

There are many things that don't get addressed in here, or are addressed in a wishy washy way. This is not a full exploration of what "truth" is and how i functions communally, or what distinguishes, for example, an outright lie from a 'white lie' or 'lie of omission.' He talks a little about why liars lie and suggests that compulsive liars do it for the pleasure, which I think is way off the mark, certainly as a generalization. But I think he's on the mark in terms of why bullshitters bullshit. I'd be curious to see him address why some people consider bullshit to be "refreshingly direct" "Saying it like it is" even if said speaker is saying it like it isn't or like he wishes it were.

Living with the biggest bullshitter I've ever known distracted me somewhat from reading this impersonally. However, I've now a handy-dandy little argument in my pocket which supports my experience that bullshit is in its insidiousness far more unwieldy and destructive than lies. Liars, at least, respect that there is a truth which they withhold or obscure, and their lies are vulnerable to confession or exposure and therefore defeat; bullshitters are careless shape-shifters, to communicate with them is to engage in shadow-boxing. They are therefore impossible for a person who values truth and honesty to deal with. I appreciate Frankfurt's assertion that bullshitters, for having an eroded or entirely lost ability to recognise or even care about the truth, are greater enemies of the truth than those who tell lies. Think about gender, think about race, think about any specifically defined group of people in the world-- and all the bullshit generated about them by television and movies, artists, scientists, "experts", or any ol' group of dumbasses at work, the bar, on the internet. It's hard to defeat bullshit. It feels right in the hearts of those who perpetuate (or buy into) it, because they don't care if what comes out of their mouths is true or not; you can't hold them accountable and their consciences won't needle them a bit, because to them it's a matter not of truth (a fact-seeking activity) but "sincerity", a slippery category of self-knowledge, which itself is an unattainable objective. If it's true that good things come in little packages, the ideas and conclusions put forth in this bitty book are no exception.

tSo I picked up On Bullshit by Harry Frankfurt at the thrift store on Friday and it is real philosophical reflection from a retired professor of moral philosophy at Princeton (printed by Princeton University Press). It is a brief and rambling little book and it would not rate higher than a three except for the conclusion to the book which I quote extensively from below.
tFrankfurt asserts, quite reasonably, that bullshit is widespread in our society. He then goes on to differentiate between lying and bullshit. For Frankfurt, the former retains a distinction between truth and falsehood, but chooses to be false. The latter blurs that distinction, with a certain willful carelessness. He relates a story where Wittgenstein chides a friend for making a thoughtless figure of speech, "You don't know what a dog that has been run over feels like." (24) For Wittgenstein, his friend's fault "is not that she fails to get things right, but that she is not even trying." (32) This is the heart of the distinction between lying and bullshit for Frankfurt, "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 propostion that she presumes to be false: Her statement is grounded neither in a belief that it is true nor, 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 of the essence of bullshit." (33-34)
tFor Frankfurt liars need the truth. "Telling a lie is an act with a sharp focus." (51) "It "requires a degree of craftsmanship, in which the teller of the lie submits to objective constraints imposed by what he takes to be the truth. The liar is inescapably concerned with truth-values. In order to invent a lie at all, he must think he knows what is true." (52) The bullshiter has much more freedom because he is not constrained by any definitions of the truth. While both represent falsity to us, the liar does so deliberately, while the one passing bullshit has never cared for truth or falsity in the first place.
tHe ends with these words:
"Why is there so much bullshit? Of course it is impossible to be sure that there is relatively more of it nowadays than at other times. There is more communication of all kinds in our time than ever before, but the proportion that is bullshit may not have increased. Without assuming the incidence of bullshit is actually greater now, I will mention a few considerations that help to acount for the fact that it is currently so great.t
tBullshit is unavoidable whenever circumstances require someone to talk without knowing what he is talking about. Thus the production of bullshit is stimulated whenever a persons's obligations or opportunities to speak about some topic exceed his knowledge of the facts that are relevant to that topic. This discrepancy is common in public life, where people are frequently impelled - whether by their own propensities or by the demands of others - to speak extensively about matters of which they are to some degree ignorant. Closely related instances arise from the widespread conviction that it is the responsibility of a citizen in a democracy to have opinions about everything, or at least everything that pertains to the conduct of his country's affairs. The lack of any significant connection between a person's opinions and his apprehensions of reality will be even more severe, needless to say, for someone who believes it is his responsibility, as a conscientious moral agent, to evaluate events and conditions in all parts of the world.
tThe contemporary proliferation of bullshit has deeper sources, in various forms of scepticism which deny that we can have any reliable access to an objective reality, and which therefore reject the possiblility of knowing how things truly are. These "antirealist" doctrines undermine confidence in the value of disinterested efforts to determine what is true and what is false, and even in the intelligility 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. Rather than seeking primarily to arrive at accurate representations of a common world, the individual turns toward trying to provide honest representations of himself. Convinced that reality has no inherent nature, which he might hope to identify as the truth about things, he devotes himself to being true to his own nature. It is as thought he decides that since it makes no sense to try to be true to the facts, he must therefore try instead to be true to himself.
tBut it is preposterous to imagine that we ourselves are determinate, and hence susceptible both to correct and incorrect descriptions, while supposing that the ascription of determinancy to anything else has been exposed as a mistake. As conscious beings, we exist only in response to other things, and we cannot know ourselves at all without knowing them. Morever, there is nothing in theory, and certainly nothing in experience, to support the extraordinary judgment that it is the truth about himself that is the easiest for a person to know. 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." (62-67)

What is bullshit? The philosopher Harry G. Frankfurt lies here some good foundations to a better understanding of bullshit -so widespread nowadays yet, surprisingly, poorly understood because not properly defined or theorised. Such a short philosophical essay is thus necessary; it's also punchy and very pertinent. Indeed, framing bullshit as something very precise and peculiar (that is, different from bluff or lies in its key relationship to truth) the definition offered by the author encompasses not only bullshit per se but, also gives an hint towards the reason for bullshitters to think the way they do and, the impact not only on the gullible but society at large. I insist on 'gives an hint' because, sadly, Frankfurt just flies over his topic without going deeper than I think he should. Nonetheless, it's punchy enough for examples to spring in the mind while reading his concerns. Indeed, from alternative medicine to conspiracy theories and antievolutionary stances, what is the future of a society where, a complete lack of concern with truth (e.g. to the point of affecting one's whole way of thinking to suit the bullshit being entertained) is accepted, tolerated and spread even by our 'elites' (medias, politicians etc.)? A tiny little book, but a great food for thoughts.