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Books

On What Matters by Derek Parfit

James Alexander ponders Derek Parfit’s new work.

Most philosophers begin like mathematicians and end like historians: they begin intensively and end extensively. Sometimes their prose style improves: sometimes it worsens. Either way, there is usually some sacrifice of depth for breadth, of severity for generosity: old ideas, stones thrown into the water when young, are now seen to create ripples out across entire oceans. Philosophy, one hopes, is such that a philosopher may begin anywhere; but they should end by discussing the whole of sophia: everything in ontology and epistemology and ethics – what there is, what we know of what there is, and what we should do about it. As is clear from this book, Parfit’s achievement is to have avoided the strange places into which philosophers sometimes wander with age: the attic of incomprehensibility; the pasture of the history of philosophy; or the hilltop on which A.

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