Derek Parfit

Derek Antony Parfit was a British philosopher, born in 1942 and died in 2017, who specialized in personal identity, rationality and ethics and is widely considered one of the most important and influential moral philosophers of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. He rose to prominence in 1971 with his first paper, Personal Identity, and his first book, Reasons and Persons, published in 1984, has been described as the most significant work of moral philosophy since the nineteenth century. His second book, On What Matters, published in 2011, was widely circulated and discussed for years before its publication. Parfit spent his entire academic career at the University of Oxford, where he was an Emeritus Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College at the time of his death, and he was also a visiting professor at Harvard, New York University and Rutgers; in 2014 he was awarded the Rolf Schock Prize for his contributions concerning personal identity, regard for future generations and the structure of moral theories.