restaurants out on the High Street for a long wine-soaked lunch.
“No,” he said, “I’m giving you lunch.”
He led me inside the college. “This is the best view in all of Oxford,” he said, gesturing out a large window toward Radcliffe Camera, the old library of Oxford. “The dome is by Hawksmoor!”
I remembered having heard that Parfit was a keen architectural photographer.
Lunch was being served to the fellows of All Souls in “the Buttery,” a Gothic dining room with a lofty coffered ceiling and highly resonant acoustics. Parfit invited me to help myself at the buffet, where I filled my plate with avocado salad and bread. We sat down to eat and talk.
Parfit told me about his life. He had been very pious as a young child, he said, but he gave up religion at the age of eight or nine. He remembered, when looking at pictures of the crucifixion, how he felt the most pity for the bad thief—“because, unlike Jesus and the good thief, he’s going to hell after he suffers and dies on the cross.”
Then he talked about mathematics, at which, he said, he was terrible. He expressed amazement that mathematics could be so complicated. A mathematician had told him that 80 percent of mathematics was about infinity. And he was horrified to learn that there was more than one infinity!
Even though his father wanted him to be a scientist, Parfit continued, he decided that he would become a philosopher. He hated the “scientizing” of philosophy, the main influences behind which, he felt, were Quine and Wittgenstein. He also hated the “naturalizing” of epistemology—the idea that the project of justifying our knowledge should be taken away from philosophers and given to cognitive scientists.
Then the talk turned to moral philosophy, which, he told me, was his main interest at the moment. Unlike many moral philosophers these days, he said, he believed that we have objective reasons to be moral, reasons that do not depend on our inclinations—adding that he would be “embarrassed even to have to defend that claim before a non-university audience.” He was appalled, he said, at some of the crazy views that contemporary philosophers had argued for, like the view that only desires can give rise to reasons.
Parfit winced, as if in pain, when mentioning such distasteful views, and often flung his arms toward the coffered ceiling in exasperation. He was equally animated when putting forth the views that he favored, leaning close to me, grinning, and vigorously nodding.
When lunch was finished, we retired into an adjoining parlor to have coffee by the fireplace and talk about why there is Something rather than Nothing.
PARFIT, AS I mentioned earlier, had declined to be quoted at length on the matter. He did, however, say that he would answer my questions with a brief affirmative or negative reply. And I had two main questions, one easy and one hard.
The easy one had to do with nothingness. Parfit clearly believed that nothingness was a logically coherent idea. Indeed, he thought it was one of the ways reality could have turned out. “It might have been true,” he had written, “that nothing ever existed: no minds, no atoms, no space, no time.” Nothingness was therefore included among his cosmic possibilities, in the form of the Null possibility.
But was nothingness also a local possibility? That is, could it coexist with a world of being?
The philosopher Robert Nozick, for one, had thought that it could. If reality was as full as possible, encompassing every conceivable world, then one of those worlds would perforce consist of absolutely nothing. That, at least, was what Nozick believed. So the question Why is there something rather than nothing? on his way of thinking, might have a simple answer: There isn’t. There’s both.
Nozick’s reasoning has convinced some scientists, including his onetime Harvard student, the string theorist Brian Greene. “In the Ultimate Multiverse,” Greene has written, “a universe consisting of nothing does exist.” Again, reality embraces both something and nothing.
And, from a somewhat different angle, Jean-Paul Sartre agreed, declaring that “Nothingness haunts Being.”
But the notion that reality could embrace both being and nothingness struck me as wrong-headed, and I said so to Parfit. How could it make sense to talk of adjoining a “world of nothing” to an ensemble of something-worlds? It would not be like adding a barren planet, or a region of empty space. For a barren planet is something. And so, pretty much everyone agrees, is a region of empty space. Space has features. It can,