As Parfit argues, the possibility of persons (or at any rate minds) splitting and re-fusing puts real pressure on intuitions about our specialness.
It is not enough to quote John F. Kennedy with our words, and then insult the memory of John F. Kennedy with second rate deeds, from second rate minds, reading second rate words, written by second rate hacks, in a nation where people hunger to be called again to great and noble deeds not because they are easy, because they are hard.
He's a lightweight, a first-degree self-publicist with a second-rate mind.
Besides, neither is sure of being the real thing: the first-rate mind, the genuine original.
Being the frustrated, unappreciated wife of an incompetent spy "with a second-rate mind" who apparently let the Cambridge spy ring operate under his nose?
The principal of her college, Somerville, the distinguished, radical haematologist Janet Vaughan, dismissed her as "a second-rate mind", the ultimate academic put-down.
Back of this we seemed to catch sight again of that ancient Hollywood and radio dream the 1st-rate writer with the 3rd-rate mind.
In a post titled "Free Irving," Andrew Sullivan blogs, "That [Irving] has such an obviously first-rate mind makes his bigotry all the more repulsive.
Three-quarters of a century later, the jurist Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. made a similar assessment of the newly elected Franklin D. Roosevelt, when he briskly pronounced: "A first-rate temperament, a second-rate mind".
It was soon obvious that Mr. Kunchikuy had a first-rate mind, so Mr. McMeekin sponsored his education and a home-stay visit to Boston, where in the winter he encountered a puzzling white substance that was very cold.
