Reasons and Persons

What Hacker News says

1. jhickokJan 2026
   I had a similar experience with Derek Parfit's "Reasons and Persons", but he offers some solace:

   ‘When I believed [that personal identity is what matters], I seemed imprisoned in myself. My life seemed like a glass tunnel, through which I was moving faster every year, and at the end of which there was darkness. When I changed my view, the walls of my glass tunnel disappeared. I now live in the open air. There is still a difference between my life and the lives of other people. But the difference is less. Other people are closer. I am less concerned about the rest of my own life, and more concerned about the lives of others.

   When I believed [that personal identity is what matters], I also cared more about my inevitable death. After my death, there will be no one living who will be me. I can now redescribe this fact. Though there will later be many experiences, none of these experiences will be connected to my present experiences by chains of such direct connections as those involved in experience-memory, or in the carrying out of an earlier intention. Some of these future experiences may be related to my present experiences in less direct ways. There will later be some memories about my life. And there may later be thoughts that are influenced by mine, or things done as the result of my advice. My death will break the more direct relations between my present experiences and future experiences, but it will not break various other relations. This is all there is to the fact that there will be no one living who will be me. Now that I have seen this, my death seems to me less bad.’

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2. dash2Jan 2024
   Reasons and Persons is a truly mind-expanding book. It's the opposite of the cliché of analytic philosophy as arid word games.
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3. bakuninsbartJan 2024
   Derek Parfait is one of the greatest philosophers in my opinion. He died too young, but his philosophy can be called contemporary.

   If you're interested, his book "Reasons and Persons" is central and quite accessible. Part 1 is boring to some, but can safely be skipped in that case.

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4. skissaneApr 2023
   My own personal introduction to philosophy came from Edwards and Pap's now rather dated 1965 textbook A Modern Introduction to Philosophy–my father did an introduction to philosophy course at university in the late 1960s, and that was the main textbook they used, and teenage me was rather excited to discover it on his bookshelf. I myself did 1st year philosophy at university in 2000, but only one unit (logic) actually had a textbook, the others I did (epistemology, philosophy of mind, metaphysics, political philosophy) just used photocopied books of readings (I remember we had readings from Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Descartes, Locke, Hobbes, Hume, Berkeley, Kant–and some more recent authors whose names escape me now). I found a site with a whole set of free university-level philosophy textbooks – https://open.umn.edu/opentextbooks/subjects/philosophy – although I can't vouch for them since I haven't read any of them myself

   Some philosophers whose works I've read and enjoyed: Robert Nozick's Anarchy, State and Utopia; Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons; Peter Singer's Practical Ethics; Graham Priest's In Contradiction; Graham Oppy's Arguing about Gods; Edward Feser's Five Proofs of the Existence of God – that's a rather eclectic and idiosyncratic list, including books by authors which radically disagree with each other (e.g. Feser's book tries to prove God exists, Oppy's book argues all known proofs of God's existence fail) - but you definitely won't find any of that "critical theory" cant in any of them

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5. skissaneApr 2023
   > That's not the point. You are confusing phylosophy and politics.

   I don't agree I am. On the contrary, there is a lot of philosophical debate on the relationship between pragmatism and truth – https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-pragmatic/ – and I think what I'm saying makes sense if you assume a certain position in that debate (albeit one which I'd expect Benatar would reject)

   Obviously, in the short-run, the popularity of a belief tells us nothing about its truth. But what about the popularity of a belief in the very long-run, in the limit of future time? If we somehow knew that, as t approaches infinity (or the future extinction of humanity), believers in a proposition will inevitably outnumber its disbelievers, would that in itself be evidence that the proposition is true? Personally, I say yes. I don't know if Benatar has written anything on this topic, but I assume he'd have to say no, since yes implies the falsehood of his published work.

   > He is carefully building an argument that if we consider an axiomatisation of ethics where causing pain is bad and getting pleasure is positive, it can be argued that life is actually a poor deal

   I think it is interesting, but for the opposite reason he thinks – if consequentialism/utilitarianism (or at least some versions thereof) produces that conclusion, to me that's another nail in the coffin of consequentialism/utilitarianism (or at least those versions of it).

   > Parfit himself spent a significant part of his career unsuccessfully looking for an axiomatisation of population ethics

   I've read Reasons and Persons. I think his discussions of the theory of personal identity are very informative, even though I don't agree with his materialist/physicalist premises. His contributions to ethics fascinate me less, because I don't believe in consequentialism, and I doubt ethics is axiomatisable

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6. kweingarFeb 2023
   I strongly encourage you to read the later chapters of Derek Parfit's Reasons and Persons. It is entirely dedicated to the question of personal identity, or more accurately, what "matters" when it comes to personal identity.

   He doesn't really address the question of reincarnation specifically, but I think you would still find it interesting. He challenges typical notions of personhood ("What makes me different from you is the physical continuity of my body over time") by pointing out that this is only a technological limitation. We could imagine a world with teleportation or brain transplants where this wouldn't necessarily be true.

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