This book, a compilation of Harry Frankfurt's 2004 Tanner Lectures,* was one of my selected secondary readings for an excruciatingly difficult philosophy mini-dissertation which I completed last week (sorry - yes, this post, other than book-specific details and links, is a copy-paste of the last post about Christine Korsgaard's similar book). It was the most intellectually strenuous thing I've ever worked on, but was also really interesting, so despite having handed in the final draft last Wednesday, I've still got my student library card until June 13th so am making the most of it by reading through the texts more thoroughly - it's an important topic and I want to actually understand it somewhat! The book contains two lectures by Frankfurt himself, then critical replies by Christine Korsgaard, Michael Bratman and Meir Dan-Cohen. I only skimmed these reply bits because the bulk of the original idea material is found in the main section and to be honest I've read far too much academic philosophy in the last two months to plough through an extra 51 pages of stuff that didn't fascinate me.
Anyway, sorry, what's it about? To explain it to someone already familiar with moral philosophy and practical reason would be superfluous as the lectures are quite short and available free online (see link at bottom); to explain it to someone not already quite closely familiar with these topics would be an endeavour far beyond the capacity of time I want to spend on this post. But I'll try, and if it sounds interesting, give it a read below.
He explores the nature of human agency and practical reasoning, which he argues are dependent on the volitional necessities of reason (as in our faculty of rationally deliberating between ends to decide on courses of action and then working out how to take means to our ends) and love (as in our capacity to care about ends in themselves in the first place, so that we have something as an object capable of propelling us to need to reason practically at all). By 'volitional necessity' I mean aspects of a person's function, as directed by their will, that are completely essential in being able to function in a way recognisable as a person: without the capacities for 'loving' anything we would be unable to adopt anything as ends, which would reduce us to merely being shunted around by whatever instantaneous exogenous desires and impulses assailed us; and without the capacity for rationality we would be unable to weight up and decisively pursue any of the ends that we claim to have, making us inefficacious. The overall model we're left with is considerably more haphazard and than most of the good-sounding ones in theories of practical reason, but this is because Frankfurt has pushed it to include the reality of love as something indispensable to human functioning; and this means that on the whole it comes across as making a great deal of sense.
I've literally read so many chapters and articles about practical reason and moral psychology recently. It was quite refreshing to sit down and go directly through one book on the topic, especially one that as far as I can see is pretty much right on all points as this one. I feel like I'm actually learning helpful applicable things about what goodness and persons are from philosophy, which does happen sometimes. As I said, this was my last ever essay, so I'm no longer a student of the subject, which is a shame, but my interest will live on - I'll be one of those weird postgrads who takes books from someone else's course out of the library for personal interest reading. But yeh, Harry Frankfurt is a top philosopher, and if my hashed attempt to explain what this book is about hasn't completely put you off, particularly if you're already interested in theories of why people do what they do and how we could rationalise it in a good coherent way, check out these fantastic lectures from the pdf link below.
* The lectures themselves, effectively comprising the entirety of the book, are available for free online here:
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