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22Later selves and moral principlesIn Alan Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy and personal relations, Mcgill- Queen's University Press. 1973.
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29Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big QuestionsRowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2004.Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better if we were immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Life, Death, and Meaning brings together key readings, primarily by English-speaking philosophers, on such 'big questions.'.
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10Iv Lewis, Perry, and What MattersIn Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Identities of Persons, University of California Press. pp. 91-108. 1976.
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27Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions (edited book)Rowman & Littlefield Publishers. 2004.Do our lives have meaning? Should we create more people? Is death bad? Should we commit suicide? Would it be better to be immortal? Should we be optimistic or pessimistic? Since Life, Death, and Meaning: Key Philosophical Readings on the Big Questions first appeared, David Benatar's distinctive anthology designed to introduce students to the key existential questions of philosophy has won a devoted following among users in a variety of upper-level and even introductory courses.
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Equality and priorityIn Derek Matravers & Jonathan E. Pike (eds.), Debates in Contemporary Political Philosophy: An Anthology, Routledge, in Association With the Open University. 2002.
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27On What Matters: Volume TwoOxford University Press. 2011.This is the second volume of a major new work in moral philosophy. It starts with critiques of Derek Parfit's work by four eminent moral philosophers, and his responses. The largest part of the volume is a self-contained monograph on normativity. The final part comprises seven new essays on Kant, reasons, and why the universe exists.
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19Later selves and moral principlesIn Alan Montefiore (ed.), Philosophy and Personal Relations: An Anglo-French Study, Mcgill-queen's University Press. pp. 137-169. 1973.
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24Divided Minds and the Nature of PersonsIn Susan Schneider (ed.), Science Fiction and Philosophy: From Time Travel to Superintelligence, Wiley. 2016.This chapter discusses problems for informational patternism and the popular soul theory of personal identity, suggests that they are incoherent, and urges that the self does not really exist. It employs the science fiction pseudotechnology of a teleporter and presents the example of split brains from actual neuroscience cases. There are two theories about what persons are, and what is involved in a person's continued existence over time. On the Ego Theory, a person's continued existence cannot …Read more
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6Commentary on ParfitIn Kim Atkins (ed.), Self and Subjectivity, Blackwell. 2005.This chapter contains section titled: Reasons and Persons, “What We Believe Ourselves to Be”
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16Improving Scanlon’s ContractualismIn Markus Stepanians & Michael Frauchiger (eds.), Reason, Justification, and Contractualism: Themes from Scanlon, De Gruyter. pp. 109-118. 2021.
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811. Reasons and PersonsIn John Martin Fischer (ed.), The Metaphysics of death, Stanford University Press. pp. 191-218. 1993.
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Is common-sense morality self-defeating?In Samuel Scheffler (ed.), Consequentialism and its critics, Oxford University Press. 1988.
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The unimportance of identityIn John P. Lizza (ed.), Defining the beginning and end of life: readings on personal identity and bioethics, Johns Hopkins University Press. 2009.
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NormativityIn Russ Shafer-Landau (ed.), Oxford Studies in Metaethics: Volume 1, Clarendon Press. 2006.
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Later Selves and Moral PrinciplesIn James Rachels (ed.), Ethical Theory 2: Theories About How We Should Live, Oxford University Press Uk. 1998.
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26Personal IdentityIn Tim Crane & Katalin Farkas (eds.), Metaphysics: A Guide and Anthology, Oxford University Press Uk. 2004.
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6052Overpopulation and the Quality of LifeIn Peter Singer (ed.), Applied Ethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 145-164. 1986.How many people should there be? Can there be overpopulation: too many people living? I shall present a puzzling argument about these questions, show how this argument can be strengthened, then sketch a possible reply.
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664Future People, the Non‐Identity Problem, and Person‐Affecting PrinciplesPhilosophy and Public Affairs 45 (2): 118-157. 2017.Suppose we discover how we could live for a thousand years, but in a way that made us unable to have children. Everyone chooses to live these long lives. After we all die, human history ends, since there would be no future people. Would that be bad? Would we have acted wrongly? Some pessimists would answer No. These people are saddened by the suffering in most people’s lives, and they believe it would be wrong to inflict such suffering on others by having children. In earlier centuries, this ble…Read more
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8275Divided minds and the nature of personsIn Colin Blakemore & Susan A. Greenfield (eds.), Mindwaves, Blackwell. pp. 19-26. 1987.
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1069Prudence, Morality, and the Prisoner’s Dilemma‹Oxford University Press. 1981."From the Proceedings of the British Academy, London, volume LXV (1979)" - title page. Series: Henrietta Hertz Trust annual philosophical lecture -- 1978 Other Titles: Proceedings of the British Academy. Vol.65: 1979.
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354Another Defence of the Priority ViewUtilitas 24 (3): 399-440. 2012.This article discusses the relation between prioritarian and egalitarian principles, whether and why we need to appeal to both kinds of principle, how prioritarians can answer various objections, especially those put forward by Michael Otsuka and Alex Voorhoeve, the moral difference between cases in which our acts could affect only one person or two or more people, veil of ignorance contractualism and utilitarianism, what prioritarians should claim about cases in which the effects of our acts ar…Read more
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595Lewis, Perry, and what mattersIn Amelie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), The Identities of Persons, University of California Press. 1976.
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1589We Are Not Human BeingsPhilosophy 87 (1): 5-28. 2012.We can start with some science fiction. Here on Earth, I enter the Teletransporter. When I press some button, a machine destroys my body, while recording the exact states of all my cells. This information is sent by radio to Mars, where another machine makes, out of organic materials, a perfect copy of my body. The person who wakes up on Mars seems to remember living my life up to the moment when I pressed the button, and is in every other way just like me.
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1686Reasons and PersonsOxford University Press. 1984.Challenging, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity, Parfit claims that we have a false view about our own nature. It is often rational to act against our own best interersts, he argues, and most of us have moral views that are self-defeating. We often act wrongly, although we know there will be no one with serious grounds for complaint, and when we consider future generations it is very hard to avoid conclusions that most …Read more
Derek Parfit
(1942 - 2017)
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |