30 Facts About Derek Parfit

Derek Antony Parfit was a British philosopher who specialised in personal identity, rationality, and ethics.

Derek Parfit is widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.

Derek Parfit was a visiting professor of philosophy at Harvard University, New York University, and Rutgers University.

Derek Parfit was born in 1942 in Chengdu, China, the son of Jessie and Norman Derek Parfit, medical doctors who had moved to Western China to teach preventive medicine in missionary hospitals.

The family returned to the United Kingdom about a year after Derek Parfit was born, settling in Oxford.

Derek Parfit was educated at the Dragon School and Eton College, where he was nearly always at the top of the regular rankings in every subject except maths.

Derek Parfit then studied Modern History at Balliol College, Oxford, graduating in 1964.

Derek Parfit abandoned historical studies for philosophy during the fellowship.

Derek Parfit returned to Oxford to become a fellow of All Souls College, where he remained until he was 67, when the university's mandatory retirement policy required him to leave both the college and the faculty of philosophy.

Derek Parfit retained his appointments as regular Visiting Professor at Harvard, NYU, and Rutgers until his death.

In Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit suggested that nonreligious ethics is a young and fertile field of inquiry.

Derek Parfit asked questions about which actions are right or wrong and shied away from meta-ethics, which focuses more on logic and language.

In Part I of Reasons and Persons Derek Parfit discussed self-defeating moral theories, namely the self-interest theory of rationality and two ethical frameworks: common-sense morality and consequentialism.

Derek Parfit posited that self-interest has been dominant in Western culture for over two millennia, often making bedfellows with religious doctrine, which united self-interest and morality.

Derek Parfit argues that it is plausible that we have such desires which conflict with our own well-being, and that it is not necessarily irrational to act to fulfill these desires.

Derek Parfit offered the "critical present aim theory", a broad catch-all that can be formulated to accommodate any competing theory.

Derek Parfit constructed critical present aim to exclude self-interest as our overriding rational concern and to allow the time of action to become critically important.

Henry Sidgwick longed for the fusion of ethics and rationality, and while Derek Parfit admitted that many would avoid acting irrationally more ardently than acting immorally, he could not construct an argument that adequately united the two.

Derek Parfit instead suggests that more complex dilemmas, such as Anna Karenina's choice to leave her husband and child for Vronsky, are needed to fully express the differences between opposing ethical theories, and suggests that deontology is free of the problems that beset Parfit's theory.

Derek Parfit was singular in his meticulously rigorous and almost mathematical investigations into personal identity.

Derek Parfit was a reductionist, believing that since there is no adequate criterion of personal identity, people do not exist apart from their components.

Derek Parfit concluded that we are mistaken in assuming that personal identity is what matters in survival; what matters is rather Relation R: psychological connectedness and continuity.

Derek Parfit described his loss of belief in a separate self as liberating:.

Derek Parfit's explanation is that it is not personhood itself that matters, but rather the facts in which personhood consists that provide it with significance.

Derek Parfit explains that from this so-called "Argument from Below" we can arbitrate the value of the heart and other organs still working without having to assign them derived significance, as Johnston's perspective would dictate.

In part four of Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit discusses possible futures for the world.

Derek Parfit discusses possible futures and population growth in Chapter 17 of Reasons and Persons.

Derek Parfit calls this "The Time-Dependence Claim": "If any particular person had not been conceived when he was in fact conceived, it is in fact true that he would never have existed".

Derek Parfit met Janet Radcliffe Richards in 1982, and they then began a relationship that lasted until his death.

Derek Parfit was an avid photographer who regularly traveled to Venice and St Petersburg to photograph architecture.