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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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28Life, 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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8Iv Lewis, Perry, and What MattersIn Amélie Oksenberg Rorty (ed.), Identities of Persons, University of California Press. pp. 91-108. 1976.
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26Life, 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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24On 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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18Later 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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22Divided 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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14Improving 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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24Personal IdentityIn Tim Crane & Katalin Farkas (eds.), Metaphysics: A Guide and Anthology, Oxford University Press Uk. 2004.
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6034Overpopulation 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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654Future 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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8257Divided minds and the nature of personsIn Colin Blakemore & Susan A. Greenfield (eds.), Mindwaves, Blackwell. pp. 19-26. 1987.
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22Why Anything? Why This?In Tim Crane & Katalin Farkas (eds.), Metaphysics: A Guide and Anthology, Oxford University Press Uk. 2004.
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9Reductionism and personal identityIn David J. Chalmers (ed.), Philosophy of Mind: Contemporary Readings, Oxford University Press. pp. 655-51. 2002.
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108CorrespondencePhilosophy and Public Affairs 8 (4): 395-397. 1979.An exchange of correspondence with Charles Fried. Parfit's section begins: "I am puzzled. Consider Case One: I could save either one stranger or five others. Both acts would involve a heroic personal sacrifice. I choose, for no reason, to save the one rather than the five. Fried argues: (i ) Since both acts would involve a heroic sacrifice, I could not be criticized if I chose to do neither. (2) If I could not be criticized for choosing to do neither, I cannot be criticized for choosing …Read more
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47On What Matters: Volume ThreeOxford University Press UK. 2011.Derek Parfit presents the third volume of On What Matters, his landmark work of moral philosophy. Parfit develops further his influential treatment of reasons, normativity, the meaning of moral discourse, and the status of morality. He engages with his critics, and shows the way to resolution of their differences.
Derek Parfit
(1942 - 2017)
Areas of Specialization
Metaphysics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Areas of Interest
Metaphysics |
Meta-Ethics |
Normative Ethics |