an impressive library, but I had brought my own reading material to London. It consisted of a Trollope novel—several scenes of which, as it happens, took place on the Doric-columned portico of this very club—and an essay, clipped from an old issue of the London Review of Books, by an English philosopher named Derek Parfit. The essay’s title was “Why Anything? Why This?”
My familiarity with Parfit as a thinker of rare originality stretched back to my undergraduate days. One summer vacation, while backpacking across Europe, I happened to be carrying around with me a little paperback anthology on the philosophy of mind. The last paper in that anthology, titled “Personal Identity,” was by Parfit, and I’ll never forget how, when I finally got around to reading it on a long train ride from Salzburg to Venice, it shook up my own sense of self. (Nor will I ever forgot how the prodigious quantity of bread, cheese, and dried sausage I devoured over the course of that train ride fortified my sense of corporeality.) Through a brisk and brilliant series of thought experiments, involving the successive fissioning and fusing of different selves, Parfit arrived at a conclusion that would have astonished even Proust: personal identity is not what matters. The permanent, identical “I” is a fiction, not a fact. There may be no determinate answer to whether, say, the callow JH who read Parfit’s essay as a student is the same self as the autumnal JH who is typing these words now.
That was how Parfit first came to my awareness. Some years later, in 1984 (by which time I was a philosophy grad student at Columbia University), he published a big book called Reasons and Persons. Here he meticulously drew out the implications of his theory of personal identity for morality and rationality, for our obligations to future generations and our attitude toward death. Many of Parfit’s conclusions—that we are not what we believe ourselves to be; that it is often rational to act against our self-interest; that our standard morality is logically self-defeating—were disquieting, to say the least. “The truth is very different from what we are inclined to believe,” the author coolly declared. But so lucid and powerful were Parfit’s arguments that the book gave rise to a veritable cottage industry of commentary in the English-speaking philosophical world. Now Parfit had turned his attention to the question that had engrossed me, the question that he himself considered to be the most “sublime” of all: why is there something rather than nothing? And he had managed to coax his thoughts on the matter into a spare, if sometimes gnomic, essay—one that I knew I had better master before meeting him.
And I was going to meet him. “I’m still very interested in ‘Why there is something rather than nothing,’ ” Parfit had responded when I wrote to him a few months earlier. As to the interview I proposed, he wrote, “I’m sure I’d enjoy it.” However, he added that since he was very slow in formulating his thoughts, he would prefer not to be quoted verbatim. Instead, he would try to answer any questions I had about his written work with a “yes” or “no” or some other brief response.
I spent much of that weekend in the bathtub under the roof of the Athenaeum, contentedly reading, soaking, sipping claret obligingly brought up to me by the porter from the club’s cellar, and pondering. Winston Churchill would have approved.
THERE ARE TWO broad questions we can ask about the world: why it is, and how it is. Most of the thinkers I had encountered so far believed that the why question should come first. Once you know why the world is, they maintained, you’ll have a pretty good notion of how it is. Suppose, like John Leslie, or Plato and Leibniz before him, you believe that the world exists because it ought to exist. Then you would expect the world to be a very good world. And if the part of it you observed didn’t look especially good, you would conclude—again, like Leslie—that it must be just a tiny bit of a larger reality that, on the whole, was very good—infinitely good, in fact.
So one way of reasoning about the world is to go from why to how. But another, less obvious way is to move in the opposite direction. Suppose you look around at the world and notice that it has some special feature, one that marks it off from all of