Bullshit Studies
October 31, 2005
A professor at Bloomsburg University is working on A Companion to Bullshit, an academic anthology of “serious essays that … responds in a timely manner to [the] popular interest in bullshit” as evidenced by Harry Frankfurt’s bestselling On Bullshit (Princeton University Press, 2005) and Laura Penny’s Your Call Is Important to Us (Crown, 2005). Perhaps a section of the book will be devoted to the academic production of bullshit, a perennial growth industry. There are certainly many possible applications in religion and politics for this new arena of scholarly analysis. Peter Edidin for The New York Times on Professor Frankfurt’s book:
[B]ullshitters seek to convey a certain impression of themselves without being concerned about whether anything at all is true. They quietly change the rules governing their end of the conversation so that claims about truth and falsity are irrelevant. Frankfurt concludes that although bullshit can take many innocent forms, excessive indulgence in it can eventually undermine the practitioner’s capacity to tell the truth in a way that lying does not. Liars at least acknowledge that it matters what is true. By virtue of this, Frankfurt writes, bullshit is a greater enemy of the truth than lies are.
This is Bullshit Studies in The Japery, a part of The New Pantagruel. Previously: Demonic Printers | Next: The Resumé Gap | TrackBack (0) | Comments (0)
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