Chances are, unless you’re a philosopher, you’ve never heard of Derek Parfit. A philosopher’s philosopher, he spent most of his career far from the madding crowd in the cloisters of All Souls College, ...

I have just been reading Larissa MacFarquhar’s very enjoyable account of the life and works of the British philosopher, Derek Parfit, in The New Yorker. No one can but be impressed by both Parfit’s ...

When news breaks, you need to understand what actually matters. At Vox, our mission is to help you make sense of the world — and that work has never been more vital. But we can’t do it on our own. We ...

Perhaps the most amazing thing I’ve read on the failure of one’s consciousness to continue was in Part III of Derek Parfit’s Reasons and Persons, which is concerned with the question of personal ...

Philosophers are not terribly good advertisements for the life philosophic. It’s not that they tend to be reprobates, although a few of them are. It’s just that their lives are usually so damned ...

I first met Derek Parfit the summer I was 19, when my college boyfriend and I spent a day visiting Oxford. Parfit’s Reasons and Persons was the only thing written by a living person on our first-year ...

I find the following argument convincing. (1) If equality is intrinsically good, then, other things being equal, leveling down is good. (2) It is false that other things being equal, leveling down is ...