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	Derek Parfit - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		Derek Parfit (born December 11, 1942) is a British philosopher who specializes in problems of personal identity, rationality and ethics, and the relations between them.
		Parfit holds that it is plausible that we have such desires outside our own well-being, and that it is not irrational to act to fulfill these desires.
		Parfit wants people to know that this is not the most recent draft and that he would be grateful for any comments, however small, to be sent to him at derek.parfit at all-souls.oxford.ac.uk.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Derek_Parfit (1813 words)

	Derek Parfit Biography (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		Parfit holds that it is plausible that we have desires other than our own well-being and that it is not irrational to act to fufill these desires.
		Parfit shows, using interesting examples and borrowing from Nashian games, that it would often be better for us all if we did not put the welfare of our loved ones before all else.
		Parfit concedes that his and rival Reductionist theories rarely conflict in everyday life, and are only brought to blows by the introduction of out of this world examples, but defends the usage in that they seem to arrouse genuine and strong feelings in many of us.
	www.biographybase.com /biography/Parfit_Derek.html (1337 words)

	20th WCP: Parfit, the Reductionist View, and Moral Commitment
		Parfit is aware that his view of personal identity is contrary to what many people ordinarily think about persons, and thus if his view is correct, many of us have false beliefs about personal identity.
		Parfit provides further arguments to show that the facts in question concern psychological continuity and/or connectedness, and thus that personal identity can be reduced to this psychological continuity and/or connectedness.
		Parfit thinks that if the man does in fact change later in his life and asks her to revoke the document we would find it perfectly acceptable of her to regard herself as committed to the young man whom he was and thus refuse to be released from her commitments by her present husband.
	www.bu.edu /wcp/Papers/PPer/PPerPalm.htm (3294 words)

	Parfit, Causation and Survival
		Parfit favours the view that any cause will do because he thinks "what matters" is that Relation R obtains, and not the means by which it obtains.
		Parfit supposes that we are interested in more than whether we have a person with beliefs, desires, apparent memory- experiences and so on, which closely match the beliefs, desires, apparently remembered experiences and so on, of some earlier person.
		Parfit holds that it is not enough for survival that Nick and Aristotle have a sufficient number of matching psychological states.
	www.geocities.com /trolleylauncher/Parfit.html (3618 words)

	Notes on Derek Parfit
		Parfit points out: we naturally assume that there is a clear answer here: either you survive or you don't.
		If by the "Ego Theory," Parfit means a theory that posits some special metaphysical entity that knits the parts of the person together into a unity -- a soul or mental substance or some such thing -- then we might grant, at least for the sake of the argument, that there is no such thing.
		Parfit gives us not the slightest reason to think that the unity of a single awareness or experience is merely a matter of our calling it an experience -- is merely nominal.
	brindedcow.umd.edu /308x/parfit.html (3619 words)

	EFFECTS OF PARFIT'S REDUCTIONISM ON ADVANCE DIRECTIVES AND THE PERSONAL IDENTITY PROBLEM
		Parfit uses an example of the hypothetical possibility of splitting the two hemispheres of the brain and transplanting each into otherwise complete bodies (including complementary hemispheres).
		Parfit believes that, in both spectra, degrees of continuity and similarity between se1ves range between more and less, and any attempt to designate a point where we could draw a line constituting the deep further fact of identity would be completely arbitrary.
		Parfit's example relies on the possibility of each hemisphere being able to live independently of the other, but Robinson shows that the two hemispheres rely on the brain stem for a necessary connection between them, without which they could not function.
	www.lib.utah.edu /epubs/undergrad/vol3/hunt.html (2066 words)

	Personal Identity
		Parfit, however, bases his new concept of "descendant selves" on the assumption that this problem can be solved if, and only if, we separate the question of identity from the problem as a whole.
		Parfit's theory of descendant selves is clever, but the conclusions that lead up to its creation rely on three perhaps questionable assumptions.
		Parfit also claims that the length of separation of the two brain halves makes a significant difference to personal identity, due to the change in the brain over time.
	ccwf.cc.utexas.edu /~govind/stories/identity.html (1629 words)

	Is Objective Consequentialism Self-Defeating?
		Parfit claims that such an objection can be made to almost all moral theories that give different aims to different agents--as opposed to theories such as act-consequentialism (AC), which give all actors who subscribe to them the same substantive aims.
		Parfit claims it is possible to include under the rubric of "substantive aims" even goals concerning "what we do," rather than what we achieve by our actions (e.g., "that I do not steal," as opposed to "that my children do not starve").
		Remember, Parfit originally defined self-defeat as believing that "we ought to do what will cause our aims to be worse achieved." And the flood case does not point merely to the possibility of indirect self-defeat, where adherents of AC will try and fail to achieve their goals.
	www.stevesachs.com /papers/paper_conseq.html (6826 words)

	Epistemicism and the Combined Spectrum
		Derek Parfit simply assumes that epistemicism is false in presenting his combined-spectrum argument, one of his main arguments for reductionism about persons.
		First, Parfit might not be relying on any general principle at all; he may have rejected the idea of a sharp borderline simply as an intuition, as something plausible in itself.
		Parfit seems sympathetic to a reductionist analogue of the Williams principle: 'This Reductionist View also meets the analogue of Requirement (2) [i.e., of the Williams principle] …On this view, what is important is relation R: psychological connectedness and/or continuity, with the right kind of cause.
	www.as.ua.edu /philos/talter/Epistemicism.htm (4736 words)

	Derek Parfit Biography \| Dictionary of Literary Biography
		Derek Parfit's career is unusual in that it largely revolves around a single work: Reasons and Persons (1984).
		Derek Antony Parfit was born in western China on 11 December 1942 to Dr. Norman Parfit and Dr. Jessie Parfit, née Browne, both of whom taught medicine at the University of Chengtu.
		Parfit attended the Dragon School in Oxford from 1950 to 1956 and Eton School from 1956 to 1961.
	www.bookrags.com /biography/derek-parfit-dlb (191 words)

	[No title]
		Parfit claims, however, that the truth about the nature of personal identity is very different from what we are inclined to believe.
		Parfit has called this alleged consequence of reductionism the extreme claim: The reductionist view gives us no reason to be specially concerned about our own futures (Parfit 1984, 307). The extreme claim is widely accepted by non-reductionists and reductionists alike.
		Parfit’s inability to provide a satisfactory argument for the moderate claim leads him to concede that the extreme claim is defensible.
	phil-rlst.academic.claremontmckenna.edu /akind/SC.doc (6949 words)

	Reasons and Persons - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
		One of Parfit's arguments is as follows: self-interest theorists consider the differences between different persons at the same time is significant in terms of rationality, but do not consider the difference between the same person at the same time to be as significant.
		Parfit's argument for this position relies on our intuitions regarding thought experiments such as teleportation, the fission and fusion of persons, gradual replacement of the matter in one's brain, gradual alteration of one's psychology, and so on.
		Parfit's conclusion is similar to David Hume's view, and also to the view of the self in Buddhism, though it does not restrict itself to a mere reformulation of them.
	en.wikipedia.org /wiki/Reasons_and_Persons (625 words)

	Agent-Neutral vs. Agent-Relative Reasons (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
		Derek Parfit, who is the first one to introduce the terminology ‘agent-relative’ and ‘agent-neutral’ makes it even more clear that the distinction is in the first instance applied to normative theories.
		So Parfit's agent-neutral moral theories provide agent-neutral reasons in his sense—in the sense of being such that a reason for one agent is guaranteed to be a reason for any agent situated to promote the end which figures in that reason.
		The fact that Parfit clearly thinks that his distinction between agent-relative and agent-neutral reasons is just the same as Nagel's distinction also suggests that Parfit's distinction is well understood as principle-based, since Nagel's version of the distinction is a paradigmatic instance of a principle-based version of the distinction.
	plato.stanford.edu /entries/reasons-agent (12397 words)

	NYU > FAS > Faculty > Global Distinguished Professors (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		Derek Parfit is a distinguished and world-renowned philosopher from Great Britain who specializes in ethics, philosophy of mind, and metaphysics.
		Professor Parfit was born in China in 1942, received his B. degree in Modern History from Oxford University in 1964, and was a Harkness Fellow at Columbia and Harvard in 1965-6, during which he changed his subject to philosophy.
		Professor Parfit is the author of Reasons and Persons, and has published in numerous journals including Philosophical Review, the Journal of Philosophy, and Ethics.
	www.nyu.edu /fas/Faculty/Global/DerekParfit.html (221 words)

	PEA Soup: Parfit's Climbing the Mountain
		Parfit holds that when we’re asking, with LNF, whether we could rationally will that some maxim be acted on by everyone, the comparison class is whether it could be acted on by no one.
		And, according to Parfit, the best version of LNF is that it is irrational to will that everyone act on some maxim if there is a better alternative maxim for everyone to act on.
		Also, Parfit wants people to know that this is not the most recent draft (he is revising on a daily basis) and that he would be grateful for any comments, however small, to be sent to him at derek.parfit@all-souls.oxford.ac.uk.
	peasoup.typepad.com /peasoup/parfits_climbing_the_mountain/index.html (2573 words)

	The Tanner Lectures on Human Values at UC Berkeley
		Derek Parfit Professor of Philosophy at NYU and Harvard will be presenting three lectures in the series "What We Could Rationally Will".
		Parfit is a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, and Member of the Faculty of Philosophy at Oxford University, United Kingdom.
		Parfit is a Fellow of several learned societies including the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
	www.grad.berkeley.edu /tanner/0203.shtml (930 words)

	[No title]
		While Parfit and Lewis stress the importance of psychology continuity, and Unger the importance of physical continuity, Martin provides for the possibility that what really matters in survival is much more trivial.
		Parfit would claim that X has indeed survived the operation, or at least that, "we ought to regard division as being about as good as ordinary survival" (p.
		It is important to add that Parfit claims the two people resulting from a division are not numerically the same as person X, or as he puts it: "...we can best describe the case by saying neither will be me" (p.
	www.uvm.edu /~cjlewis/martin2.rtf (2348 words)

	PARFIT’S PUZZLE
		Parfit’s diagrammatic representations of parts of his argument effectively embody this assumption, for he displays the relative qualities of lives by drawing lines that extend more or less far up a vertical axis (see 385, 388, 419 for examples).
		Parfit is fond of imagining worlds in which the population of a world divides into two disconnected groups (perhaps on different galaxies), so that there can be no question of an attempt to remedy any differences in the quality of the lives they lead.
		Parfit’s own elaboration of the Repugnant Conclusion, especially in the sequence of worlds we considered in section 3, embodies just that supposition (which is one reason why I take the proof of section 7 to distill what’s crucial to his puzzle).
	www.columbia.edu /~psk16/ppn.htm (9209 words)

	Book Review by Anthony Campbell: Reasons and Persons - Derek Parfit
		Parfit no doubt writes for them as well, but he manages simultaneously to make his ideas accessible to a non-professional audience - quite a feat.
		Parfit's avowed intention in writing is not merely to explain things but to effect change, not only in individuals but in society at large: a pretty ambitious undertaking.
		Parfit is a genuinely original thinker, who challenges all kinds of beliefs that most of us have absorbed without thinking about them except in the most superficial way.
	www.accampbell.uklinux.net /bookreviews/r/parfit.html (778 words)

	REASONLESS PERSONS
		In Parfit's example he is using two different meanings of rationality: The first in terms of one's self-interest or practical rationality, the second in terms of correct reasoning or theoretical rationality.
		For example, Parfit’s exposition of Self-interest Theory, or S, includes the proposition that, (S5) The supremely rational desire is that one’s life go as well as possible for oneself, and similarly, (S6) The supremely rational disposition is that of someone who is never self-denying (Parfit 8).
		The non-objectivity of Parfit’s portrayal of Practical Reason is most clearly demonstrated in the fact that he continues by defending certain Japanese couples that leap off of precipices at the height of their ecstasy because they want their lives to end at the highest or best point.
	www.mindspring.com /~careese/reasonlessPersons.htm (5961 words)

	Amazon.com: Reasons and Persons (Oxford Paperbacks): Books: Derek Parfit (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		However: while Parfit's style is very clear, and he doesn't refer as extensively as some philosophers to the work of previous authors, I probably wouldn't want to tackle this bad boy without at least some training in philosophy.
		Parfit is gentleman and scholar enough to let us in on his game.
		Parfit's book is excellent because it covers a lot of ground, but it isn't bogged down with a lot of jargon.
	www.amazon.com /Reasons-Persons-Oxford-Paperbacks-Parfit/dp/019824908X (1681 words)

	METAPHORS OF MENTAL MULTIPLICITY (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		Hume and Parfit both begin with the idea that strict identity (of a sort that obeys so-called Leibniz’s law) is not to be found in objects that persist through time, since it cannot be said that everything about a person S at time t is true of S at time t’.
		One alleged consequence of Parfit’s view, for example, is that once the "important" relation of R-relatedness has been substituted for the old relation of identity, we must countenance a number of possibilities that from the old perspective seem absurd.
		In short, Parfit’s view of the self, no more and no less than the view he opposes, are metaphysical is just the pejorative sense given to that expression by the logical positivists.
	www.chass.utoronto.ca /~sousa/METAPHOR.html (6364 words)

	Amazon.fr : Reading Parfit: Livres en anglais: Jonathan Dancy (Site not responding. Last check: 2007-10-12)
		When it was first published in 1984, Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons was heralded as one of the most significant achievements in moral philosophy to have appeared in recent times.
		Now, Reading Parfit brings together some of the most distinguished scholars in the field to discuss and critique each of the four parts of this outstanding work, and present a detailed response to Parfit's philosophical perspective.
		Parfit's responses to these papers will be published later in two separate volumes entitled Practical Realism and The Metaphysics of the Self.
	www.amazon.fr /Reading-Parfit-Jonathan-Dancy/dp/0631197265 (345 words)

	NYU > Philosophy > Parfit, Derek
		DEREK PARFIT (BA, MA, Oxford) specializes in ethics and philosophy of mind.
		He is a Senior Research Fellow of All Souls Oxford and a Fellow of the British Academy and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.
		In a permanent arrangement with NYU, Professor Parfit teaches in the Department for two 7 week periods every four semesters.
	philosophy.fas.nyu.edu /object/derekparfit (75 words)

	ON THE METHODOLOGY OF THOUGHT EXPERIMENTS
		Many of Derek Parfit's revisionist arguments concerning personal identity draw upon our responses to such hypothetical situations as human duplication or human fission or brain-transplant experiments of various sorts.
		Parfit seems to mean that certain of his hypothetical cases may in fact be impossible, in some sense of the word 'impossible' which he does not here discuss, but that this would have no significant effect upon the thrust of his argument concerning personal identity.
		Parfit himself does not assign this particular thought experiment to any specific category of the impossible and would appear to regard any such assignation as irrelevant because "these cases arouse in most of us strong beliefs"[19].
	www.uea.ac.uk /phi/research/UEA4PAP1.html (6235 words)

	Lauren SIP
		He then proceeds to search for a moral principle for dealing with different number choices, which are decisions that affect who will live in the future (the personal identity of future people) and how many people will live in the future.
		Parfit forces us to realize that our decisions affect who will live in the future.
		Parfit fails to recognize that our decisions affect more than just future generations but the future in general.
	www.conncoll.edu /ccrec/greennet/ccbes/Class2003/Hartzell/LaurenSIP.htm (298 words)

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