Derek Parfit 1942 – 2017

Derek Parfit was a British philosopher widely regarded as one of the most important moral philosophers of the late twentieth century. A long-serving senior research fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, he devoted the better part of three decades to a single book, Reasons and Persons, published in 1984, and a further long labour to On What Matters, published in two volumes in 2011 with a third appearing posthumously. He defended a reductionist account of personal identity, an exacting consequentialism, and the convergence of the great ethical theories on a common core. His careful moral arguments and famous puzzle cases have shaped ethics, population theory, and the philosophy of personal identity.