Chances are, unless you’re a philosopher, you’ve never heard of Derek Parfit. A philosopher’s philosopher, he spent most of his career far from the madding crowd in the cloisters of All Souls College, ...

Dylan Matthews was a senior correspondent and head writer for Vox’s Future Perfect section. He is particularly interested in global health and pandemic prevention, anti-poverty efforts, economic ...

Philosopher whose books inspired his academic peers all over the world Your body is destroyed, but only after it has been scanned and the blueprint beamed to Mars, where an organic replica of you is ...

I first met Derek Parfit the summer I was 19, when my college boyfriend and I spent a day visiting Oxford. Parfit’s Reasons and Persons was the only thing written by a living person on our first-year ...

Philosophers are not terribly good advertisements for the life philosophic. It’s not that they tend to be reprobates, although a few of them are. It’s just that their lives are usually so damned ...

David Johnson: How did you become interested in extreme cases of moral virtue? Larissa MacFarquhar: I’ve been interested in them for a long time, but one of the things I read that got me thinking in a ...

Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter. For more than 20 years, the English philosopher Derek Parfit would leave his home in Oxford and spend five ...