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 ...

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 ...

Parfit, by David Edmonds (Princeton). Widely regarded as one of the most important philosophers of the past century, Derek Parfit was born to a British missionary family in China, and spent most of ...

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 ...

Derek Parfit, pictured at Oxford in 2015, published seldom, but his works of philosophy were ambitious and influential. Rex Features, via Associated Press Mr. Parfit was a British philosopher whose ...