Peter Singer included Reasons and Persons on a top ten list of favourite books in The Guardian, stating that " Parfit's penetrating thought and spare prose make this one of the most exciting, if challenging, works by a contemporary philosopher ".

Part 3 argues for a reductive account of personal identity ; rather than accepting the claim that our existence is a deep, significant fact about the world, Parfit's account of personal identity is like this:

Philip Kitcher wrote in his review of Parfit's On What Matters that Reasons and Persons " was widely viewed as an outstanding contribution to a cluster of questions in metaphysics and ethics ".

Parfit's argument for this position relies on our intuitions regarding thought experiments such as teleportation, the fission and fusion of persons, gradual replacement of the matter in one's brain, gradual alteration of one's psychology, and so on.

On the other hand, measuring the utility of a population based on the average utility of that population avoids Parfit's repugnant conclusion but causes other problems.

On Parfit's account, individuals are nothing more than brains and bodies, but identity cannot be reduced to either.

Parfit's explanation is that it is not personhood itself that matters, but rather the facts in which personhood consists that provide it with significance.

Derek Parfit's reductionist account is also reminiscent of Buddhism.

One of Parfit's arguments is as follows: self-interest theorists consider the differences between different persons at the same time as significant in terms of rationality, but do not consider the difference between the same person at the different times to be as significant.

Parfit's conclusion is similar to David Hume's view, and also to the view of the self in Buddhism, though it does not restrict itself to a mere reformulation of them.

For besides being reductive, Parfit's view is also deflationary: in the end, " what matters " is not personal identity, but rather mental continuity and connectedness.

A similar tone of underlying futility and despair pervades the spy thrillers of Eric Ambler and dominates the most famous of all American mystery stories, Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon.

The most famous document that comes out of this dispute is perhaps Sir Philip Sidney's An Apologie For Poetrie, published in 1595.

The most surprising thing about the Twenty-second Congress of the Soviet Communist Party is that it is surprising -- perhaps quite as much, in its own way, as the Twentieth Congress of 1956, which ended with that famous `` secret '' report on Stalin.

The most famous ballet of that time was called Ballet Comique De La Reine ( 1581 ).

The most unusual of them is the Ithaca 49 ( about $20, $5 for a saddle scabbard ) -- a lever-action single-shot patterned after the famous Winchester lever-action and featuring the Western look.

Colorado's Grand Canyon, probably the most famous landmark of the United States, can be the highpoint of your Western vacation.

One of the most damaging tsunami on record followed the famous Lisbon earthquake of November 1, 1755 ; ;

Of course, 1600 Pennsylvania, the White House, is the most famous address of the free world.

The most famous undergraduate of South Philadelphia High School is a current bobby-sox idol, Dreamboat Cacophonist Fabian ( real name: Fabian Forte ), 17, and last week it developed that he will remain an undergraduate for a while.

The 1858 senate campaign featured the seven Lincoln – Douglas debates of 1858, the most famous political debates in American history.

The famous Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook stated that love is the most important attribute in humanity.

The most famous work of Algerian cinema is probably that of Mohammed Lakhdar-Hamina, Chronicle of the Years of Fire, which won the palme d ' Or at the Cannes film festival in the year 1975.

The most famous such organism is Amoeba proteus ; the name amoeba is variously used to describe its close relatives, other organisms similar to it, or the amoeboids in general.

Aldous Leonard Huxley ( 26 July 1894 – 22 November 1963 ) was an English writer and one of the most prominent members of the famous Huxley family.

Significantly, Huxley also worked for a time in the 1920s at the technologically advanced Brunner and Mond chemical plant in Billingham, Teesside, and the most recent introduction to his famous science fiction novel Brave New World ( 1932 ) states that this experience of " an ordered universe in a world of planless incoherence " was one source for the novel.

The Vikings, the Portuguese, and the Spaniards were the most famous among early explorers.

This was expressed by Korzybski's most famous premise, " the map is not the territory ".

Nobel held 350 different patents, dynamite being the most famous.

Milne is most famous for his two Pooh books about a boy named Christopher Robin after his son, Christopher Robin Milne, and various characters inspired by his son's stuffed animals, most notably the bear named Winnie-the-Pooh.

Probably the oldest, and most famous, list of axioms are the 4 + 1 Euclid's postulates of plane geometry.

Conium maculatum has been used as a sedative and in treatments for arthritis and asthma in addition to its most famous use: as a “ humane ” method of killing criminals and philosophers.

Miss Marple, another of Christie ’ s most famous characters, shares these characteristics of careful deduction though the attention paid to the small clues.

Along with Miss Marple, Poirot is one of Christie's most famous and long-lived characters, appearing in 33 novels, one play, and more than 50 short stories published between 1920 and 1975 and set in the same era.

Like Agatha Christie, she isn't overly fond of the detective she is most famous for creating – in Ariadne's case the Finnish sleuth Sven Hjerson.

The consciousness it mirrors may have come earlier to Europe than to America, but it is the consciousness that most `` mature '' societies arrive at when their successes in technological and economic systematization propel them into a time of examining the not-strictly-practical ends of culture.

The men who speculate on these institutions have, for the most part, come to at least one common conclusion: that many of the great enterprises and associations around which our democracy is formed are in themselves autocratic in nature, and possessed of power which can be used to frustrate the citizen who is trying to assert his individuality in the modern world ''.

There were several men of ninety or more whom I knew first or last, all of whom were still productive and most of whom knew one another as if they had naturally come together at the apex of their lives.

Never once during the trying thirties did I come so close to succumbing to the private climate of opinion as to grant Russian communism even that most weasel-worded of encomiums `` an interesting experiment ''.

It is at precisely such moments that he encounters a couple of undergraduates, faces alight, holding hands and talking happily as they come along, oblivious of him, or throwing him the most fleeting and casual of glances, such as they would give a tethered goat.

On most drill presses, it is impossible to get the exact speed, but you can come close by adjusting the drive belt on the step-cone pulleys.

Half the manhours you pay for on most jobs are wasted because the job was not planned right, so the right tools were not handy at the right place at the right time, or the right materials were not delivered to the handiest spots or materials were not stacked in the right order for erection, or you bought cheap materials that took too long to fit, or your workmen had to come back twice to finish a job they could have done on one trip.

but if a complement for come is implied and by Tuesday is a prepositional unit used as an adjunct, by will be unstressed or lightly stressed at most.

The moments of sung melody, in the usual sense, come most often when the character is actually supposed to be singing, as in folk songs and liturgical chants.

In our own time we have seen the most fantastic imagery of a Jules Verne come into actuality.

I am told the time will soon come when women will find it necessary to do most of their own work, and even now it is important to have conveniences for the use of servants.

This increase in the `` threshold '', as the conventional forces strengthening is called, will prove one of the alliance's most difficult problems in the months to come.

He suggested that without the Socialist Party ever gaining a national victory, most of its original program has come to pass under both major parties.

On the final round at Pensacola, the luck of the draw paired Palmer and Player in the same threesome and, although it was far from obvious at the time, the gallery was treated to the first chapter of what promises to be one of the most exciting duels in sport for a long time to come.

It becomes most evident in his description of Christ as the second Adam, who does indeed come to destroy sin, but whose work culminates in the achievement of immortality.

One of the finest soft shoe tunes ever invented, `` Once In Love With Amy '' is also, of course, one of the most tantalizingly persistent of light love lyrics to come out of American musical comedy in our era.

Instead -- and not just to prove my objectivity -- I hasten to report that it's a highly amusing film which probably does a fairly accurate job of reporting on the Easter vacation shenanigans of collegians down in Fort Lauderdale, and that it seems to come to grips quite honestly with the moral problem that most commonly vexes youngsters in this age group -- that is to say, sex.

The D Minor Sonata, Op. 31 No. 2, introduced by dynamically shaped arpeggios, was most engaging in its moments of quasi-recitative -- single lines in which the fingers seemed to be feeling their way toward the idea to come.

Strange faces, most of them, and I wasn't even sure all of them had come from the League meeting.

A number of species have come to be considered invasive, including, most notably in North America, dandelion, which was originally introduced by European settlers who used the young leaves as a salad green.

Among the many volumes of the holy Rabbi Yitzchak Luria ( known as the " Ari "), most of which come downfrom the pen of his primary disciple, Rabbi Chaim Vital, are profound insights explaining issues related to reincarnation.

The most common criticism of HH Price's afterlife hypothesis has come from the religious community as his suggestions are not consistent with traditional Christian teaching, nor the teachings of any other monotheistic religion.

* Wonton soup – In most American Chinese restaurants, only wonton dumplings in broth are served, while native Chinese versions may come with noodles.

Afonso, born in 1109, took the title of Prince after taking the throne of his mother, supported by the generality of the Portuguese nobility who disliked the alliance between Galicia and Portugal Countess Theresa had come to, marrying a second time the most powerful Galician count.

Agathocles was cited as from the lowest, most abject condition of life and as an example of “ those who by their crimes come to be princes ” in Chapter VIII of Niccolò Machiavelli ’ s treatise on politics, The Prince ( 1513 ).