When he was in America, he was compelled to procure his own food. Because he didn’t want to waste time on choice or preparation, he developed rigid routines that he could follow without thinking. For years, according to a colleague, he made the same meal every morning for breakfast, which he conceived of as a recipe for maximum health: sausage links, green peppers, yogurt, and a banana, all in one bowl. One day, the colleague’s nutritionist wife explained to him that this was not a particularly healthy meal, and suggested a better meal; the next day he switched to the new meal and never varied it.

He was always conscious of how little time he had. When he had to go from one building to another on a big American campus, he ran. But his routines were not just about time-saving: he found himself constantly returning to the same thoughts, philosophical and otherwise—that was just the way his mind worked. “At one point, I spent a year at Harvard when he was visiting there and we would go out to dinner,” Larry Temkin, a philosopher and former student of his, says. “We went to the same place, a Thai restaurant, every time, and every time he would order some curry and I would order something that had pineapples and rice and cashews. And every time he’d say, ‘Larry, isn’t that boring, don’t you want some of my curry?’ I’d say, ‘No, Derek, I don’t like curry, it’s too spicy for me.’ And then the next week we’d go to the same restaurant, and he would order the same meal, and I would order the same meal, and he’d say, ‘Larry, isn’t that boring, don’t you want some of this?’ And I’d say, ‘No, Derek, I really don’t, you like the curries, but they’re too spicy for me.’ And the next week the same thing would happen again. It was like ‘Groundhog Day.’ ”

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Theo Parfit married an American, settled outside Washington, D.C., and had three children. She studied social work and became an expert on families. She wrote about how to hold families together in a crisis, and about ways to involve families in the education of their children. Although she lived far away, she kept in touch with her parents and siblings and cousins. She tried to see her brother when he came to the East Coast, as he frequently did, to teach, but usually he didn’t call. He didn’t do this to avoid her—it simply didn’t occur to him, because he was thinking about philosophy. She knew this, and tried not to feel hurt. When they did see each other, he was very friendly.

Parfit lived near his parents in Oxford, and saw them once a week, for Sunday lunch. His mother read up on philosophy to try to understand his work, but since Parfit saw her only with his father they couldn’t talk much about it. His father was baffled by him; he couldn’t understand why he became a philosopher—he thought he ought to have been a scientist. He tried, unsuccessfully, to interest his son in tennis.

Joanna struggled to find work. Finally, she managed to qualify as a nanny. She became pregnant and had a son, Tom, whom she raised on her own. A few years later, she adopted a daughter. She loved her children, but they didn’t make her happy. Every few months, she telephoned Parfit to talk to him about how depressed she was and how badly things were going. He dreaded those calls. Then, in her thirties, she died in a car crash.

She had not made a will, and after she died there was a harrowing fight over her son. Her daughter was re-adopted quickly, but Jessie was determined that Tom should be placed in a family she knew. The trouble was, his placement was in the hands of the local council, and Jessie so antagonized the council with her uncompromising opinions and her upper-middle-class accent that it sought actively to thwart her. Jessie was in agony, and Parfit became very emotionally involved. The case ended up in court, and he wrote a long and passionate brief supporting his mother. At last, the case was resolved in their favor. Jessie died soon afterward, although she was not sick or particularly old. Once Tom was safely placed with his new family, nearby, Parfit never saw him.

As the years went by, Theo came to accept that although her brother loved her, it was simply not important to him to spend time with his family. He was extremely softhearted, and she knew that in a crisis he would always help her, but deepening ties to his past through continuity, valuing blood as a source of kinship—these were just not part of who he was. Years later, Parfit wrote to her in a letter that they had reacted to their unhappy family in opposite ways. They were like the Rhine and the Danube: they begin very close, but then they diverge—one flows to the Atlantic, the other to the Black Sea.

Sometime around 1982 or ’83, the philosopher Janet Radcliffe Richards moved from London to Oxford, having ended her first marriage. She had become well known a few years earlier for writing “The Skeptical Feminist,” a fierce attack on anti-rational tendencies in the women’s movement, and was teaching philosophy of science at the Open University. She was very beautiful and very feminine. She attended a seminar that Parfit was teaching. She had never encountered anyone like him: he was obviously a strange person, but not in any of the usual ways. Afterward, Amartya Sen, a friend, who was co-teaching the seminar, greeted her, and, when she left, Parfit asked Sen who she was.

D.P.: I read some of Sam Scheffler’s recent work and he’s arguing that people care about the future of humanity much more than they realize. And I think that’s right, actually. J.R.R.: The Future of Humanity Institute people keep talking about engineering humans to make them more moral. I haven’t got a clear enough view of what it would be, because it would have to be something so different from humans that I’m not sure why bother, any more than turn everybody into termites or something. D.P.: Oh no! You could— J.R.R.: The essence of us is that the things we value are close connections and families and groups, and that necessarily means that we care about other people less.

At the time, Parfit was preparing the manuscript of “Reasons and Persons” for the printer. This involved a certain amount of anxiety, but the enormous intellectual labor that had consumed him for fifteen years was over. He was entering a rare transitional moment, between decades-long periods of total philosophical immersion, in which his mind was, for a short time, receptive to other things.

Parfit read Richards’s book and wrote her a letter about it, suggesting that they meet and discuss it further. He went out and bought three identical black suits. They met. He offered to rent her a computer. (He had just discovered computers—he had bought one secondhand and was very excited about it.) With unpracticed but single-minded diligence, he pursued her.

She was bewildered. An eminent philosopher had sent her a letter that in tone and content resembled an academic article, and now he was offering to rent her a computer. How much did it cost to rent a computer? He had not named an amount. He certainly seemed very interested in talking with her, and he was charming and brilliant and unexpectedly good-looking, but what was he up to? He never flirted—he talked to her exactly as he would talk to a man. After a time, she deduced from the sheer frequency of his attentions that his interest must be romantic, but this was not apparent in his behavior. She began to wonder if he would propose to her before they had kissed.