Separately, Edmonds mentions Parfit’s aphantasia, a condition of incapacity to generate mental images that also seems, Edmonds notes, to be linked with a weak sense of connection to one’s past, but he doesn’t draw out the connection between Parfit’s life and his thinking. Though he was professionally competitive - cutthroat, even, Edmonds suggests - those instincts did not extend to his romantic life, in which he appears to have been a kind of proto-polyamorist in the ’70s, another instance of porous borders. He was, in other ways, too, clearly a product of his era. His first paper, the barnburner “Personal Identity,” came in 1971 its claims that persons are always shading into new identities and that they have deeper connections to each other than they might realize seem appropriate to the hippie heyday. In some ways, Parfit’s work was of his times, and “Parfit” draws out those connections, perhaps without discussing them as explicitly as a reader might like.
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