Abstract
The " bullshit ", discussed in philosophy since Harry Frankfurt's famous essay, " On Bullshit " (1986), is a particular way of sabotaging the integrity of discourse that proliferates in certain contemporary contexts of political speech. Why, in these contexts, is it so difficult to conduct productive debates ? Frankfurt's classical analysis offers only limited resources for understanding this. It ignores examples of bullshit that do not concern assertions but other speech acts, as well as cases where the bullshit, far from being hidden, is manifest, even ostentatious. I advocate a broad, non-assertionist conception of bullshit that allows us to characterize more precisely its different forms, and the specific damage it inflicts on the exercise of public debate.
