In a 2014 review of one of his books, Stewart Shapiro and Teresa Kouri said of Parsons: "It surely goes without saying that [he] is one of the most important philosophers of mathematics in our generation".

He earned his Ph.D. in philosophy at Harvard University in 1961, under the direction of Burton Dreben and Willard Van Orman Quine.

[4] He retired in 2005 as the Edgar Pierce professor of philosophy, a position formerly held by Quine.

[5] Among his doctoral students were Michael Levin, James Higginbotham,[6] Peter Ludlow, Gila Sher and Øystein Linnebo.

[10] He has also written on historical figures, especially Immanuel Kant,[11] Gottlob Frege,[12] Kurt Gödel,[13] and Willard Van Orman Quine.