And whatever else the west London suburbs and commercial areas my train was passing through at the moment might be—drab, dingy, dispiriting—they were not nothing.
As for Platonic goodness being the Selector, as John Leslie believed, I had long ago put that rather too sanguine notion behind me. So, by the way, had Parfit. “We may doubt that our world could be even the least good part of the best possible Universe,” he dismissively observed.
But if this world fails to be ethically distinguished, it does seem to be special in other ways. It displays orderly causal patterns. Moreover, the laws that govern it appear to be, on the deepest level, remarkably simple—so simple that, if Steven Weinberg is right, human scientists are today on the verge of discovering them. Surely these two features—causal orderliness and nomological simplicity—mark off the actual world from the great ruck of messy and complicated cosmic possibilities.
This sort of thinking had led Parfit to the tentative conclusion that there might be at least two “partial Selectors” for reality: being governed by laws, and possessing simple laws. And could there be still others that we have not yet noticed? Possibly. “But observation can take us only part of the way,” he observed. “If we can get further, that will have to be by pure reasoning.” Such reasoning aims at the highest principle governing reality—the same principle that physicists are trying to discover. Thus, said Parfit, “there is no clear boundary here between philosophy and science.”
Hello! The train is pulling into Oxford already, right at the prick of noon.
FROM THE TRAIN station it was just a short walk to the town center—a walk with which I was by now well familiar. “Come to All Souls College in the High Street at 1 p.m. and ask the Porter to call me from the lodge by the College gate,” Parfit had instructed me in his letter.
Since I had a little time to kill, I dropped into Blackwell’s on Broad Street, the best scholarly bookshop in the English-speaking world. I headed downstairs to the vast philosophy section, where, after browsing a bit, I found a wonderful book of photo-portraits of the greatest living philosophers, taken by a photographer named Steve Pyke. Parfit was among the subjects. His appearance was certainly striking: an elongated face, featured with thin lips, a granite nose, and wide pensive eyes, was surmounted by a luxuriant profusion of curly silver-white hair, which extended down the sides of his head almost to the level of his chin. Each photo was captioned with a personal statement by the philosopher who had posed for it. Parfit’s read, “What interests me most are the metaphysical questions whose answers can affect our emotions and have rational and moral significance. Why does the Universe exist? What makes us the same person throughout our lives? Do we have free will? Is time’s passage an illusion?”
A quarter of an hour later, I was peering through the rather forbidding gate of All Souls. THE COLLEGE IS CLOSED, announced one sign. QUIET PLEASE, said another. Beyond the gate, I could see a courtyard with two manicured rectangles of grass.
I made myself known to the college porter, who was dour of aspect, and waited as he rang up my host-to-be.
All Souls is a storied place. (“All Souls, no bodies,” says the wag.) One occasional visitor to All Souls when he was an Oxford undergraduate in the 1960s was Christopher Hitchens, who described it as “a florid antique shop that admitted no students and guarded only the exalted privileges of its ‘fellows,’ a den of iniquity to every egalitarian and a place where silver candelabras and goblets adorned a nightly debauch of venison and port.” The fellows of All Souls, seventy-six in number, are selected from the most august ranks of the British academy and public life. Having no tutoring duties, they are free to pursue, amid sumptuous surroundings, a life of pure scholarship and speculative thought—relieved, perhaps, by internal politics and gossip. Parfit, somewhat unusually, had spent the whole of his career there, having been elected a “prize fellow” in 1967, fresh out of his undergraduate days at Balliol College.
And here he was, bounding toward me diagonally across the quadrangle—a tall, gangling, smiling fellow, whose unruly mop of argent tresses fulfilled the promise of the photo I had just seen. He was wearing a bright-red tie, which rhymed with his rather rubicund face. We shook hands and exchanged greetings. I offered to take him to one of the better