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 ...

It is impossible to sum up in a couple of hundred words the richness, subtlety and complexity of the philosophy of Derek Parfit, who died at the age of 74 on New Year’s Day. However, it takes just two ...

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, ...

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 ...

Brilliant and eccentric, the Oxford philosopher spent his career grappling with fundamental moral questions. By David Edmonds Reasons and Persons (1984) earned Derek Parfit a reputation as one of the ...

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 ...

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 ...

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 ...