He was known to struggle with talking about anything other than philosophy, which was his intense passion. Parfit disliked wasting time, and so always wore the same clothes and ate the same food to avoid having to choose what to wear and to eat. He had Asperger’s syndrome, which seems to have contributed both to his ability to focus on a given set of problems with laser-like intensity and his lack of concern for many material things. Parfit was well known to be an eccentric personality. He assumed a position at Oxford University, where he would remain for the rest of his life, marrying his longtime partner Janet in 2010.
He later switched his focus to philosophy, publishing the 1971 paper “On Personal Identity” which made him instantly famous across the academic world. Later he thought of becoming a poet, before studying history at Eton College and later at Columbia and Harvard. During his childhood, Parfit considered becoming a monk, and was apparently disturbed that his non-believing parents did not share his theological commitments. Parfit’s family quickly moved back to Oxford where he was to live for most of his life. He was the son of Jessie and Norman Parfit, British doctors sent to teach preventative medicine in missionary hospitals. Those interested in a more thorough summary of Parfit’s later book should read Mark Schroeder’s excellent review of the first two volumes in Notre Dame’s Philosophical Reviews.ĭerek Parfit was born in Chengdu, China in 1942. This is in part because the later book is so vast, technical, and almost unwieldy-right down to the cameo commentaries by other moral philosophers and appendices that include essays on topics such as why anything exists-that it defies any easy summation.
In this article, I will be focusing mostly on Parfit’s arguments about the self and personal identity, and only briefly touching on how this relates to his arguments in On What Matters. This extremely ambitious claim was mainly presented in the three volumes of Parfit’s On What Matters, a book which prior to its publication was called “the most eagerly awaited book in philosophy” and, according to Peter Singer, is the “most important publication in moral philosophy since Henry Sidgwick’s The Methods of Ethics.” Moreover, Parfit argued that from a meta-ethical standpoint we had compelling reasons to believe that holding to these moral principles ‘mattered’ in a deep sense, meaning that we should reject the nihilistic belief that nothing, including morality, was of value. Parfit believed he had demonstrated that his ‘triple theory’ was just such a non-subjective set of moral principles. Secondly, Parfit was concerned with ‘what mattered.’ He wanted to demonstrate that there was a non-subjective set of moral principles which human beings were capable of rationally understanding. His philosophical examination of these issues were presented in seminal works such as his 1971 paper “Personal Identity” and his now classic 1984 book Reasons and Persons. Do we have self? If so, what is it? Does the self possess any value? And so on. Firstly, Parfit was concerned with the perplexing question of the self and personal identity. Parfit’s work divided into two related set of concerns. This article on Parfit’s criticism of the self and personal identity is intended to make a small contribution to that goal. Though his work was not as widely known by the general public as other intellectual luminaries, his brilliant philosophical insights and imagination deserve a wider audience. Few contemporary philosophers have done more to challenge conventional answers to such questions than Derek Parfit, who tragically passed away on January 1, 2017. The recent passing of a very good friend of mine, to whom this article is dedicated, has prompted me to reflect more deeply on certain philosophical questions about who were are and what really matters.
Dedicated to the Memory of Connor O’Callaghan