I can't wait to read this. I had written to Derek last year (we have a sporadic correspondence). Now I see he had an amnesia attack just before I wrote him, which makes me wonder whether that was why he didn't write back...
Derek is one of the first heavy philosophers to work his way towards something like Buddhism, from the standpoint of utilitarianism, in his room at All Souls. It's remarkable really. The hostility to him in the mid eighties was immense. Students had to write essays refuting his “no person view.”
I ended my subscription to the New Yorker last year but went into three different shops in order to buy lasts weeks copy and read the article.
ReplyDeleteIt's surprising to me to learn about all the heavy resistance. Parfit's work on personality always struck me as-well obvious I guess.
Since I was a little kid I had been having very weak feeble versions of thought experiments about Star Trek transporters. When people pointed me to Parfit I saw the professional, robust version of those same thoughts. I figured everyone else would just "get it" too.
I didn't know anything about Parfit's personal life before reading the New Yorker article. It surprised me to see the portrait they painted of him. They painted him as a kind of grown up kid who doesn't know how to exist in the world, borderline mentally ill, a social freak who is really only good at one thing and can barely have a relationship to another human being. Someone who sees ethics in such an odd way primarily as an outgrowth of his own odd form of life.
I can't really believe it, seems too much of a caricature, but who knows. I'd love to see a video of an interview or observe a lecture, or meet him and just talk. Maybe he really is the way they describe him.
Hi Thomas, I know what you mean. I reckon at least 50% of the picture has to do with the phenomenon of the Oxford don; not Parfit in particular.
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