Reasons and Persons

⚖The case for it

Parfit takes his time. The opening arguments, about theories that undermine themselves, ask a lot of patience before they give anything back, and plenty of readers stall there. The reward for pushing through is a method: he will not let you keep a belief about yourself that you haven't tested against a case built to break it. By the end the ordinary sense of a continuous self has come apart, and you feel how little goes missing when it does. Parfit said his own death frightened him less afterward, and he offered that as consolation, not as a clever result.

— the honest librarian

✕The case against

Parfit argues through hundreds of numbered cases: teletransporters, divided brains, branch-line survivors. The machinery is brilliant and exhausting; Part One, on self-defeating theories, is a desert you must cross to reach the famous material on identity. Philosophers needed this rigor. You, with finite evenings, may want a guide to the good parts rather than all five hundred pages.

— the honest librarian