Parsons was born in
Endicott, New York and graduated from the
University of Rochester with a BA in physics. He received his PhD from
Stanford University in 1966. He was a full-time faculty member at the
University of Illinois at Chicago from 1965 to 1972, at the
University of Massachusetts at Amherst from 1972 to 1979, at the
University of California at Irvine from 1979 to 2000, and at the
University of California at Los Angeles from 2000 to 2012. In 2007, he was elected to the
American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Parsons died in 2022 at the age of 82 or 83. ==Philosophical work==