A 'GROUND-BREAKING' philosopher whose work on identity was described as 'close to a work of genius' has been remembered by colleagues at Oxford University.

Professor Derek Parfit, a celebrated academic and Emeritus senior research fellow at All Souls College, died aged 74 on New Year's Day this year.

Born in December 1942 to doctors Jessie and Norman Parfit in the Chengdu province of the former Republic of China, Prof Parfit and his family moved to Oxford about a year after his birth.

From an early age he endeavoured to become a poet but gave up poetry towards the end of his adolescence, studying at Eton College alongside his brother Derek.

On his time at boarding school, he told the New Yorker in 2011: "I remember becoming aware that, for most children, home was where they lived, and not merely, as it was for me, a place that I visited for brief interruptions to my main life that was lived at school."

He would go on to graduate in modern history from Balliol College in 1964, and, following a spell at Harvard, he returned to Oxford to take up a prize fellowship at All Souls.

His research concerned personal identity, non-religious morality and our obligations to future generations.

Personal Identity, his first paper, was published in 1971 and outlined a theory of identity that diminished the importance of the 'self' as a single, enduring thing.

Instead he argued that physical and psychological continuity are what is important to a person's identity.

Adam Hodgkin, philosophy editor at Oxford University Press at the time Reasons and Persons was published, called him 'an extraordinary and ingenious philosopher and a fascinating and delightful conversationalist'.

Later works by Prof Parfit included Reasons and Persons, published in 1984, and On What Matters, published in three volumes between 2011 and 2017.

In 1982 he met Janet Radcliffe-Richards after a regular philosophical 'sparring match' in the Old Library at All Souls.

The pair married in 2010 and Professor Radcliffe-Richards is today a professor of practical philosophy at Oxford, specialising in feminism, discrimination and Darwinian theory.

They did not have any children.

Writing for the magazine Philosophy Now following Prof Parfit's death, Jeff McMahan, a professor of moral philosophy at Oxford, described him as 'one of the most important philosophers of the past half century and,in the view of many, the single best moral philosopher in more than a century."

He added: "His imaginative, innovative, but also meticulously rigorous arguments have transformed the ways in which philosophers,economists, political and legal theorists and others think about many moral issues. He was also an endearingly eccentric and even saintly person."