Amazon Book Description
- From the bestselling coauthor of "Edmonds (David) & Eidinow (John) - Wittgenstein's Poker", an entertaining and illuminating biography of a brilliant philosopher who tried to rescue morality from nihilism.
- Derek Parfit (1942–2017) is the most famous philosopher most people have never heard of. Widely regarded as one of the greatest moral thinkers of the past hundred years, Parfit was anything but a public intellectual. Yet his ideas have shaped the way philosophers think about things that affect us all: equality, altruism, what we owe to future generations, and even what it means to be a person. In Parfit, David Edmonds presents the first biography of an intriguing, obsessive, and eccentric genius.
- Believing that we should be less concerned with ourselves and more with the common good, Parfit dedicated himself to the pursuit of philosophical progress to an extraordinary degree. He always wore gray trousers and a white shirt so as not to lose precious time picking out clothes, he varied his diet as little as possible, and he had only one serious non-philosophical interest: taking photos of Oxford, Venice, and St. Petersburg.
- In the latter half of his life, he single-mindedly devoted himself to a desperate attempt to rescue secular morality ― morality without God ― by arguing that it has an objective, rational basis. For Parfit, the stakes could scarcely have been higher. If he couldn’t demonstrate that there are objective facts about right and wrong, he believed, his life was futile and all our lives were meaningless.
- Connecting Parfit’s work and life and offering a clear introduction to his profound and challenging ideas, Parfit is a powerful portrait of an extraordinary thinker who continues to have a remarkable influence on the world of ideas.
- “To write an entertaining biography of the philosopher on whom, of all those I have encountered, the label ‘genius’ best fits, is quite a feat. David Edmonds does that in this beautifully written and thoroughly researched volume that also offers fascinating glimpses of academic philosophy and life in Oxford during the past sixty years.”
→ Peter Singer, author of Ethics in the Real World
- “Derek Parfit’s electrifyingly original philosophy transformed thinking about who we are, what matters in life, and how we should care about the future. And the man was as original as his work. In this revelatory and fascinating biography, David Edmonds describes how the young Parfit’s many passions contracted into a fervent, all-consuming search for moral truth.”
→ Larissa MacFarquhar, author of Strangers Drowning: Impossible Idealism, Drastic Choices, and the Urge to Help
- “Derek Parfit was perhaps the most important philosopher of his era. This scintillating and insightful portrait of him is one of the best intellectual biographies I have read.”
→ Tyler Cowen, author of Stubborn Attachments: A Vision for a Society of Free, Prosperous, and Responsible Individuals
- “A delight-filled, page-turning romp through the life and thought of one of the world’s greatest moral philosophers ― completely unknown to most but with ideas that could change the way we think about ourselves and the future of humanity.”
→ Ruth Chang, University of Oxford
- “Derek Parfit was the most brilliant and original moral philosopher in well over a century. In certain ways saintly, he was also legendarily eccentric. David Edmonds’s eagerly awaited biography tells the fascinating story of Parfit’s life in a lively and engaging manner while also providing accessible explanations of his most important philosophical ideas. Both instructive and entertaining, this is greatly rewarding reading.”
→ Jeff McMahan, University of Oxford
Review: FT Best 5 Philosophy Books of 2023
- Interview of Nigel Warburton by Cal Flyn
→ FT - Warburton - The Best Five Philosophy Books of 2023
- Let’s move to your next 2023 philosophy book recommendation, which is David Edmonds’ biography of Derek Parfit, who died in 2017. It’s subtitled: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality. Could you tell us about the man and his mission?
- So Derek Parfit was an unusual figure and David Edmonds has collected a lot of information about just how unusual he was. As a philosopher, he came to notice in the early 1970s with a couple of articles about personal identity — what it is to be a self over time. I remember reading these as an undergraduate student, and they were very different to the typical philosophical journal article. But his basic position was that there could be good reasons for thinking that we might have more in common with the people around us now than we might with our future selves. That’s a Buddhist-like concept of the self, and he did explicitly draw some analogies with Buddhism. It was an unusual position to take for a mainstream Oxford philosopher, though elements of it were in a tradition that stems from John Locke.
- Then he went quiet for a bit before he produced, in the mid-1980s, under great pressure, a book called "Parfit (Derek) - Reasons and Persons". It elaborated on what he thought about the nature of the self and how that impacts on morality and questions about altruism. Then he went on to the mission that occupied the rest of his life, which was that he thought he could and should prove conclusively the objectivity of morality — according to him what is right or wrong is not subjective, but absolutely objective. He wanted to do that without bringing in any kind of divine guarantee for this objectivity. He was very much an atheist, but as Edmonds’ biography makes clear, he followed a family tradition of being a missionary.
- What do you mean?
- His parents were literally missionaries. And Parfit had a sort of missionary zeal for proving and persuading people beyond doubt that morality was objective, meeting every possible objection and persuading his most eminent colleagues that this was so. Or at least trying to. He even said that his life would have been a waste if he didn’t succeed in showing that morality was objective.
- I think it’s generally accepted that he didn’t succeed in that. But he became obsessed … when I say obsessed, I mean he was obsessive as well. Quite a lot of the biography charts the fascinating arc of his life — from the good-looking, intelligent, young man, a brilliant student, who had always been exceptional in his intelligence, and the transformation that happened in later life. He was somebody who was…neurodiverse, let’s put it that way. He had some OCD characteristics, would clean his teeth for hours, would work absolutely obsessively. He doesn’t seem to have had the same kinds of connections with people that you might have expected of someone who writes in such an elegant, sophisticated way.
- I used to share an office with his wife, Janet Radcliffe Richards.
- Prospect1 once described them as having “the world’s most cerebral marriage.”
- She used to tell me some stories about him. He was always working — writing a paper, or reading a book, or commenting on other people’s writing. But he needed the fuel of coffee to keep him going. So rather than waste time making a decent cup of coffee he would use instant coffee and just turn on the hot tap. Janet said he sometimes didn’t even wait for the water to warm up. Parfit would be reading a book at the same time as making the coffee.
- He was unusual in other ways too: he could be incredibly generous with his time. For someone considered a high flyer — he had an All Souls fellowship, didn’t have to teach, could devote himself entirely to his research — he had a huge amount of time for anyone who wanted to discuss ideas with him. If somebody sent him an essay on something he’d written, he would return the next day with comments even longer than the essay. This was partly because he wanted to get everything right.
- For exercise, he would happily sit on an exercise bike in his underpants in front of the main window overlooking the street, absolutely oblivious to people looking in. And maybe he didn’t always put underpants on. It just wouldn’t have occurred to him that this might be found offensive or disturbing.
- Are there some parallels here with the Diogenes biography? Is there something in the genre of philosophical biography that explores the application of philosophy, praxis versus theory?
- Well, Diogenes’ philosophy wasn’t a written philosophy. He was performing philosophy as a series of gags, really, some of them visual. Derek Parfit was all theory. It was philosophy through words not performances. All he did for most of his later life was theorise, talk philosophy, write philosophy, communicate about philosophy, talk, give talks, and so on.
- Behind all this, there is an interesting question about what you’re doing when you’re writing a biography of a philosopher. There was a much-read profile of Parfit2 that appeared in his lifetime, by the New Yorker staff writer Larissa MacFarquhar. Like all of those New Yorker pieces, it was a very elegantly constructed profile, and focused very much on how unusual he was as a man. The question is, how connected is that kind of obsessive behaviour with his philosophy? That’s a question that Edmonds had to address too.
- And?
- It’s difficult to say. There’s a risk that he just gets remembered as this odd guy, who did strange things, was neurodiverse, whatever. There was a critical piece about Edmonds’ biography in the London Review of Books3 that argued that he should have written more about Parfit’s philosophy and by implication perhaps less about his quirks. And I can sympathise with that to some extent. But someone else can write the definitive book about Parfit’s philosophy. This is a biography.
- There’s a sense in which biography gives an opportunity to expound on somebody’s thought in historical context. Philosophers have philosophical ideas, and you have a duty to write about those in a biography. That’s what Ray Monk did so well in his biography of Wittgenstein ("Monk (Ray) - Ludwig Wittgenstein - The Duty of Genius"). Edmonds did a great deal of research, talking to people who knew Derek Parfit well, and what lingers for them is just what an unusual man he was, as a man as well as a thinker. And that’s interesting for a wider readership as well, the mystery around how he developed into that obsessive workaholic from what he was as a young man. So once he’d done that research, Edmonds was right to tell that story. It’s very interesting.
- Yes.
- Many of the people who knew Derek Parfit well, (and there were a lot of them because he cultivated a network of philosophers who commented on what he wrote), really admire Edmonds’ book. It’s very difficult to achieve that when your subject has died so recently.
In-Page Footnotes ("Edmonds (David) - Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality")
Footnote 1: Footnote 2: Footnote 3:
Book Comment
Princeton University Press (18 April 2023)
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