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News

News: February/March 2017

Irish President calls for more philosophy in schools • Judge rules on chimpanzee rights • Derek Parfit and Zygmunt Bauman dead — News reports by Anja Steinbauer and Katy Baker

Derek Parfit (1942-2017)

The philosopher Derek Parfit died on New Year’s Day, aged 74. Parfit is best known for using imaginative thought experiments in his 1984 book Reasons and Persons to show problems with the concept of personal identity. One thought experiment looks at what might happen if you were to step into a teletransporter. In this device, your body is first scanned atom-by-atom and then completely destroyed. But the information is transmitted somewhere else, say to a corresponding teleportation device on Mars, where you are exactly recreated using local materials.

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