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“... In the first half of this essay, I suggested how reality’s deepest features might be partly explained. Of the countless cosmic possibilities, or ways that reality might be, a few have very special features. If such a possibility obtained, that might be no coincidence. Reality might be this way because this way had this feature. Thus, if nothing had ever existed, that might have been true because it was the simplest way for reality to be ...”

“... Why does the Universe exist? There are two questions here. First, why is there a Universe at all? It might have been true that nothing ever existed: no living beings, no stars, no atoms, not even space or time. When we think about this possibility, it can seem astonishing that anything exists. Second, why does this Universe exist? Things might have been, in countless ways, different ...”

“... Amia Srinivasan’s article in this issue first appeared on the LRB blog. You can read it here ...”

“... to Richard Swinburne in Oxford, to David Deutsch in Headington, to John Leslie in Canada, to Derek Parfit, again in Oxford. He meets Roger Penrose in New York, has phone conversations with Steven Weinberg and John Updike. These conversations become a way of evoking possibilities as much as seeking answers, and some of these possibilities are ...”

“... In his recent book Reasons and Persons the Oxford philosopher Derek Parfit is inclined to decide that persons have no existence, and that the motives to morality are for that reason clearer and more cogent. So-called personality is a matter of self-interest: bees in a hive have no moral problems. Examining their own world and using their own vocabulary, empirical and linguistic philosophers quite naturally and rightly come to such conclusions ...”

“... of philosophy, and (with the exception of some philosophers such as John Rawls) other disciplines. Derek Parfit has written a brilliantly clever and imaginative book which treats in a very original way a wide range of ethical questions. It spends virtually no time on meta-ethics (perhaps too little), but it avoids many of the deformations that sometimes ...”

“... of moral philosophers is to discern such a rationale and to shape it by criticism and argument. Derek Parfit’s On What Matters looks to two great moral philosophers, Immanuel Kant in the late 18th century and Henry Sidgwick, whose treatise The Methods of Ethics first appeared in 1874. Kant, Parfit writes, ‘is the ...”

“... For David Edmonds​ , and for many other philosophers, Derek Parfit, who died in 2017, was one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past century, perhaps even since John Stuart Mill. Edmonds rightly believes that if Parfit’s ideas about personal identity, rationality and equality were absorbed into our moral and political thinking, they would radically alter our beliefs about punishment, the distribution of social resources, our relationship to future generations, and more ...”

“... utilitarianism which is beyond doubt closest to his own view: the version developed in the work of Derek Parfit. (Collins does refer to Parfit’s ideas, and in this respect the books can usefully supplement one another.) Kolm has also written important work on the transition to socialism, and is much concerned with the ...”

“... living my life. But will I survive in duplicate? In his book Reasons and Persons, Derek Parfit argues that I will survive in duplicate, but without my identity, because the line of my particular identity could not possibly continue in both my beneficiaries simultaneously and there is no good reason to suppose that one of them carries it ...”

“... for example, to the recent thinking of philosophers like David Wiggins and Bernard Williams, Derek Parfit, Thomas Nagel and Charles Taylor. (It might also be even harder.) As it is, there seem to be no grounds for optimism at all. For more than a quarter of a century I have found Alasdair MacIntyre the most stirring and the most imaginatively ...”

“... to the mental states which can be predicated of him. Here the implicit target of the polemic is Derek Parfit, whose recent Reasons and Persons offers the most complete statement of the view that the person is ‘nothing but’ a sequence of mental and bodily states related in a certain way. At another level, the book is about the temporal structure of ...”

“... one of the most influential contemporary pieces of metaphysical analysis in this area – that of Derek Parfit. Parfit claims that, in normal circumstances, personal identity (what makes me the same person across time) is a matter of the holding of certain relations of psychological continuity and connectedness ...”

“... The most prominent defenders of Realism today – Thomas Nagel, T.M. Scanlon, Ronald Dworkin and Derek Parfit – explicitly deny that Realism carries the heavy metaphysical burden Kitcher is worried about. According to the Naturalist, all genuine truths correspond to states of affairs of the spatio-temporal world. Ethical statements like ‘keeping ...”

“... people who have laboured on the question of beneficence and global obligation. Writers such as Derek Parfit, Liam Murphy and Shelly Kagan from the utilitarian tradition, Thomas Nagel, Thomas Scanlon and Thomas Pogge from the Kantian, Gerald Cohen, Brian Barry, the economists Amartya Sen, John Roemer and Partha Dasgupta, all get a nod in a footnote at ...”