Reasons and Persons.

PARFIT, Derek [Annette Baier].

Item Number: 146332

Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1984.

First edition of one of the most important philosophical texts of the second half the twentieth century. Octavo, original cloth. With a rare two page letter on two pages from the author Derek Parfit to fellow philosopher Annette [Baier]. The letter is on letterhead paper of All Souls College, Oxford and dated 9 June 1984 and reads, “Dear Annette, Thank you for very much for sending your review. I am enormously pleased, and overwhelmed, by what you wrote. I shan’t comment further on the content, though I should love to discuss several parts of your review with you. I shall merely make one remark about the issue you raise in your Reductionist view. As much as you, I am most unhappy with volatile agents, changing their tastes and plans and commitments from week to week, and living lives of great disunity. But I think that, even if we believed the Reductionist View, we would not become like that. Perhaps paradoxically, I am more struck than others are by how very little most people change, from early childhood to old age. I’ve hardly changed at all since I was about 13. I think this may be an instance of a more general phenomenon. I believe that there is no deep unity to a life partly because the superficial unity seems to me so striking. Similarly, many of the Classical Hedonist thought that only pleasure had value, because they were abnormally deficient in their enjoyment of ordinary sensual pleasures. For them, the “higher” pleasures really were the most intense. This explains why such ascetics as Sidgwick and Mill were hedonists. And remember Hobbes’s remark that “the gratification of curiosity far exceed in intensity all carnal delight”. I am very sorry to have to report that I have now decided I must decline an offer to be the commentator on your talk on Trust at the Chapel Hill Colloquium. My father died two weeks ago, and I am therefore having to spend much time helping my mother with all the many things that need to done in consequence. This means that I shall be very behind-hand with prior commitments this Fall, and may have to time at all to write a proper comment on your talk. I am very sorry about this, but resolved that we shall have longer discussions informally. I must end by saying again how thrilled I was by your review. I have been feeling drained lately, but reading your review aroused in me a sudden strong desire to write another book. I had no such desire before I read what your wrote. [Handwritten] “Yours, with great affection, Derek.” The recipient, Annette Baier was a New Zealand philosopher and Hume scholar, who focused in particular on Hume’s moral psychology. Baier’s approach to ethics is that women and men make their decisions about right and wrong based on different value systems: men take their moral decisions according to an idea of justice, while women are motivated by a sense of trust or caring. The history of philosophy having been overwhelmingly compiled by men, she suggests, leads to a body of thought which apparently ignores the role of nurture and trust in human philosophy. Fine in a very good dust jacket. Annette Baier ownership signature to the front free endpaper. An exceptional association linking these two great philosophers.

Challenging, with several powerful arguments, some of our deepest beliefs about rationality, morality, and personal identity, Derek Parfit claims that we have a false view about our own nature. It is often rational to act against our own best interests, he argues, and most of us have moral views that are self-defeating. We often act wrongly, although we know there will be no one with serious grounds for complaint, and when we consider future generations it is very hard to avoid conclusions that most of us will find very disturbing. Derek Parfit is widely considered one of the most important and influential philosophers of the late 20th and early 21st centuries.