“Parfit: A Philosopher and his mission to save morality,” by David Edmonds is one of the best books I have read so far this year. Here are a few passages that I enjoyed.
From Derek Parfit’s diary as a 10-year old boy:
I had heard before lunch that my grandfather, who is 83, had died. I felt queer for a little while because he was the only grandfather I had ever had, but mummy told me that he had been unconscious for a week and that it was better for him to just die peacefully. That cheered me up considerably. [p. 19]
And from a second diary, when he was 11:
One thing I can never understand is how in all modern adventure stories written for children, the young boy hero always awakes at the crack of dawn and, the moment he opens his eyes, leaps out of bed, with as much vigour as a fresh springbook, and immediately rushes over to the window, flings wide the shutters, letting in a cold draught of damp morning air, as if he was half suffocated. This I have never, or ever will do. [p. 21]
At Eton:
Derek Parfit was never much of a one for introspection; a cache of letters sent from Eton to his young sister, Joanna, have survided, but these give few clues as to his mood and contain little information about what he’d been up to. But they are affectionate and jockey, and so unlike the tone of Derek’s future self. On 11 October 1969 he addresses ‘the dreamingest, darlingest sweetest gentlest sister’, closing the letter with, ‘Buckets of oodling LOVE, brother’. [p. 34-5]
While studying history at Oxford:
Later, Parfit reported that he had always been less interested in history rather than philosophy. Indeed, in the second term of his first academic year, he contemplated a switch to ‘PPE’: philosophy, politics, and economics. The economics component still deterred him; he was anxious that the mathematics involved was beyond him. In order to test himself, he began to read an economic textbook. The first part of it—which was about how there was a dimishing marginal utility from peas (the more you ate, the less pleasure they gave you)—made perfect sense.
‘Since I understood that claim, I told my friends at dinner in Hall that I was going to change to PPE. But after Hall I read a few more pages. I came across a symbol I didn’t understand, which was a line with a dot above and a dot underneath. I went to ask someone with rooms nearby what this symbol meant. When he told me that it was a dividing sign, I felt so humiliated that I stayed in History’. [p. 41]
The exam for the Gibbs Prize at Oxford, which Parfit won:
What his tutors and examiners never found out was that he was not above inventing quotations in his exams. His motivation was simply to get the best possible marks—he mentioned to one friend that he had invented quotations from Otto von Bismarck. He loathed Bismarck more than just about any other historical figure, believing this nineteenth-century German statesman to be at the root of much of the evil unleashed in the following century. [p. 57]
Jumping to the middle of the book:
Sometimes in the mid-1990s, [philosopher and friend of Parfits’Larry] Temkin was visiting Oxford, and went to visit Parfit in his All Souls’ rooms, when he saw one of the most stunning photogtaphs he’d ever seen… Parfit explained how it had been produced. It was his favourite of the thousand of pictures he had taken from the same spot. However, not entirely satisfied with it, he had gone to London to employ the services of a photographic developer…
Parfit asked for several corrections, never satisfied. It took “several iterations, with Parfit travelling back and forth by train to London,” and a hefty fee paid to the developer, before the “photograph emerged that was now on the wall in his study.”
A year later, Parfit visited Temkin at Rice University in Houston, Texas, with an extraordinary gift.
[Parfit] rummaged around in the bag, pulling out shirts and underpants and books, until he found what he was looking for—the photograph that Temkin had so admired. It was completely ruined. He’d crumpled it up. [p. 184-5]
Jumping to the end of the book:
Parfit would send drafts of his work to his best students, who treated the request to supply feedback as a flattering but serious responsibility. Ruth Chang had a fresh set of comments with her in the early 1990s when, in a terrifying experience, she was held up at gunpoint. She was walking along Massachusetts Avenue in Cambridge, Massachusetts with two men, following a Thanksgiving dinner. The two men, with guns pressed into their ribs, were ordered to hand over their wallets, and Chang to hand over her bag. Together, the three of them managed to persuade the muggers to keep the money but return what really mattered: Parfit’s marked papers. [p. 250]
There are stories like these almost on every page. And of course there is Parfit’s philosophy, rendered in a beautiful and vivid fashion. Highly recommended.