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Obituary

Derek Parfit (1942-2017)

Jeff McMahan says farewell to a friend.

Derek Parfit, who died unexpectedly on the second day of the new year, was one of the most important philosophers of the past half century and, in the view of many, the single best moral philosopher in more than a century. His imaginative but also meticulous and rigorous arguments have transformed the ways in which philosophers, economists, political and legal theorists and others think about many moral issues. He was also an endearingly eccentric and even saintly person.

Parfit was born in 1942 in China, where his parents were medical missionaries. When he was still young, they returned to the UK to live in Oxford.

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