Derek Parfit

This week we’re going to continue our discussion of personal identity with one of the most famous and influential things to be written about personal identity in the last fifty years, which comes from the philosopher Derek Parfit.

If you’re not careful, Parfit will reinforce every bad stereotype that you have ever encountered of what a philosopher might be like. He wrote and taught at All Souls College, Oxford, throughout his career, and is quite an interesting character in his own right. You can read about him in his New York Times Obituary (paywalled), about his photography in the Financial Times (not paywalled), and you can read what Parfit had to say about me in volume 2, chapter 27, of his book On What Matters (you have online access through USC libraries). And if you are incredibly bored this week and looking for a way to procrastinate studying for midterms, you can find what I had to say about Parfit (including about what he had to say about me) here.

Young Parfit

Old Parfit

As you read Parfit’s article “Personal Identity”, try to think about how his views relate to those of the three texts that we discussed last week.

TIOR

We again have a somewhat longer TIOR assignment for this week - this time 600-700 words. Make sure that you use one paragraph for each part of the TIOR, and again my advice is to draft it as a four-sentence essay first, and then to expand on it, to help keep you disciplined and structured.