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David Edmonds, Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality

Princeton University Press, 2023, xxii + 380pp., ISBN: 978-0691225234

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Notes

  1. Roger Scruton, ‘Parfit the Perfectionist’: Philosophy , Vol. 89, No. 350 (October 2014), pp. 621–634.

  2. Bernard Williams “The Point of View of the Universe: Sidgwick and the ambitions of ethics” in Making Sense of Humanity, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press 1995, p. 171.

  3. I have met philosophers surprised that Aristotle is on this list, but: ”Understanding evidently does not move anything without desire—for wish is a desire, and when movement is in accord with calculation, it is in accord with wish” (De Anima III 10 433a 22–9). For St. Augustine: “in the pull of the will and of love appears the worth of everything to be sought or avoided, to be thought of greater or less value.” Both writers of course emphasized the possibility of improving or mastering our passions, but not from a position outside all of them.

  4. The first was a review in the Financial Times for 2011, and the second a paper “All Souls Night” which is in Does Anything Really Matter?, a collection of essays on Parfit edited by Peter Singer (Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 81–98. Both are available at https://swb24.user.srcf.net/

  5. On What Matters, vol. III. Oxford: Oxford University Press 2017, Chapter 46.

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    Simon Blackburn

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Blackburn, S. David Edmonds, Parfit: A Philosopher and His Mission to Save Morality. Soc 60, 448–453 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1007/s12115-023-00845-w

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