I just finished reading David Edmonds’s excellent biography of Derek Parfit (pictured below). My general takeaway from Edmonds is that Parfit’s willingness to embrace “effective altruism” (an intellectually bankrupt movement led by naïve or corrupt do-gooders of which I shall have more to say soon) will end up tarnishing the Oxford philosopher’s legacy. Be that as it may, two of my favorite sentences in the book appear on the bottom of page 328. The first sentence states: “Parfit, helpfully, had a folder on his computer in which he dropped all the files that could be useful for posthumous publications.”

The second sentence, however, reads: “Less helpfully, it is empty.”