Parfit was born in China, and educated at Balliol College, Oxford. In 1967 he gained a Fellowship at All Souls College, Oxford, and subsequently worked at Oxford, New York University, and Harvard. Parfit’s interest was in those metaphysical questions that have moral and emotional significance. His book Reasons and Persons (1984) is a fertile exploration of both moral and metaphysical problems concerned with the nature of the self, arguing, like Buddhism and Hume that its identity through time is an illusion, and discussing the impact of such a metaphysics of the self on problems of rational agency and ethics. His work in ethics culminated in the massive two-volume On What Matters (2011) in which a resolute rationalism or intuitionism about the nature of ethics is combined with an attempt to see Kantianism, virtue theory, and rule-utilitarianism as reconcilable attempts to climb the same mountain from different sides.