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, ...

Philosopher whose books inspired his academic peers all over the world Your body is destroyed, but only after it has been scanned and the blueprint beamed to Mars, where an organic replica of you is ...

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

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 ...

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 ...

Derek Parfit, a British philosopher whose writing on personal identity, the nature of reasons and the objectivity of morality re-established ethics as a central concern for contemporary thinkers and ...

David Johnson: How did you become interested in extreme cases of moral virtue? Larissa MacFarquhar: I’ve been interested in them for a long time, but one of the things I read that got me thinking in a ...