20th century · 1942–2017
Who influenced Derek Parfit?
Influences
Reasons and Persons: personal identity may not matter — ethics became rigorous.
Derek Parfit was influenced by Henry Sidgwick and John Rawls. That is 2 lines of the 448 documented lines of influence between the 279 thinkers on this map.
Read on Wikipedia Portrait: Anna Riedl, CC BY-SA 4.0 See the whole map
Who was Derek Parfit?
Derek Parfit worked on personal identity, rationality and ethics and spent his whole career at Oxford, at All Souls College. His first paper, "Personal Identity" (1971), made his name, and his book Reasons and Persons (1984) has been called the most significant work of moral philosophy since the 1800s.
His second book, On What Matters (2011), was circulated and argued over for years before it appeared. In 2014 he received the Rolf Schock Prize for his work on personal identity, our duties to future generations and the structure of moral theories.
Summarized from the lead of the Wikipedia article.
Who influenced Derek Parfit?
2 direct influences on this map, earliest first.
- Henry Sidgwick 1838–1900
- John Rawls 1921–2002
The line of teachers behind Derek Parfit
The longest documented line of influence ending at Derek Parfit runs 21 generations back, to Thales of Miletus.
- Thales of Miletus
- Anaximenes of Miletus
- Anaxagoras
- Socrates
- Antisthenes
- Diogenes of Sinope
- Crates of Thebes
- Zeno of Citium
- Seneca
- Tertullian
- Augustine of Hippo
- Anselm of Canterbury
- Peter Lombard
- Thomas Aquinas
- René Descartes
- John Locke
- George Berkeley
- David Hume
- Jeremy Bentham
- John Stuart Mill
- Henry Sidgwick
- Derek Parfit
Two steps away from Derek Parfit
Indirect influences
- Through Henry Sidgwick: John Stuart Mill
- Through John Rawls: Immanuel Kant
Contemporaries of Derek Parfit
Thinkers on this map born within 25 years of Derek Parfit, with no direct line between them.
- David Lewis 1941–2001
- Saul Kripke 1940–2022
- Tzvetan Todorov 1939–2017
- Robert Nozick 1938–2002
- Edward Said 1935–2003
- Umberto Eco 1932–2016
- John Searle 1932–2025
- Richard Rorty 1931–2007
Derek Parfit by the numbers
- Direct influences
- 2
- Direct followers
- 0
- Thinkers upstream
- 94
- Thinkers downstream
- 0
- Wikipedia languages
- 28 — #78 of 84 among 20th-century philosophers
- Card rarity
- Rare
Questions about Derek Parfit
- Who influenced Derek Parfit?
- Henry Sidgwick and John Rawls.
- Who did Derek Parfit influence?
- No later thinker on this map is recorded as drawing directly on Derek Parfit.
- When did Derek Parfit live?
- 1942–2017. The map files Derek Parfit under the 20th century.
- How rare is the Derek Parfit card?
- Wikipedia carries an article on Derek Parfit in 28 languages, which makes it a Rare card. Legendary starts at 100 languages, Epic at 50 and Rare at 25.
More 20th-century philosophers
- Jean-Paul Sartre 1905–1980
- Albert Camus 1913–1960
- Max Weber 1864–1920
- Simone de Beauvoir 1908–1986
- Bertrand Russell 1872–1970
- Ludwig Wittgenstein 1889–1951
- Martin Heidegger 1889–1976
- Umberto Eco 1932–2016