Parfit: A Philosopher and his Mission to Save Morality

Review of Parfit: A Philosopher and his Mission to Save Morality by David Edmonds (Princeton University Press,  April 18, 2023).

Writing for Oxford Alumni, Richard Lofthouse says:

The author should be congratulated. This is both a fabulous book and a necessary biography of a significant Oxford academic who a lot of people have sort of heard of but can’t quite place: Derek Parfit (1942-2017) (Balliol, 1961), or as Edmonds offers, ‘the most famous philosopher most people have never heard of.’

One reason for that relative obscurity is Parfit’s reclusive nature and relative lack of ego, but that shouldn’t be confused with his enormous stature among many but not all other philosophers, as a man who devoted his entire life to rebuilding moral philosophy in the absence of God.

Links

Read full article on Oxford Alumni website here: https://www.alumni.ox.ac.uk/article/the-man-from-all-souls

Princeton University webpage: https://press.princeton.edu/books/hardcover/9780691225234/parfit

David Edmonds https://www.practicalethics.ox.ac.uk/people/dr-david-edmonds