Harry Frankfurt

Frankfurt was an American moral philosopher whose work on free will, moral responsibility and the structure of the will — especially his idea of 'second-order desires' — reshaped debate in analytic philosophy. His short book 'On Bullshit' (2005) unexpectedly became a New York Times bestseller. Born to an unwed mother and adopted as an infant, he was raised in a Jewish family in Brooklyn and Baltimore; his documented Jewish identity comes from that upbringing.