The Book of Dead Philosophers

To philosophize is to learn how to die. Cicero; assassinated by order of Mark Antony. One who no longer is cannot suffer. Lucretius; suicide, allegedly driven mad by a love potion. Life is solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short. Hobbes; died in bed, age 91. In this collection of brief lives (and deaths) of nearly two hundred of the world's greatest thinkers, noted philosopher Simon Critchley creates a register of mortality that is tragic, amusing, absurd, and exemplary. From the self-mocking haikus of Zen masters on their deathbeds to the last words of Christian saints and modern-day sages, this irresistible book contains much to inspire both amusement and reflection. Informed by Critchley's acute insight, scholarly intelligence, and sprightly wit, each entry tells its own tale, but collected together they add up to a profound and moving investigation of meaning and the possibility of happiness for us all.

Simon Critchly is Professor and Chair of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He is the author of many books, most recently, On Heidegger's Being and Time and Infinitely Demanding: Ethics of Commitment, Politics of Resistance. The Book of Dead Philosophers was written on a hill overlooking Los Angeles, where he was a scholar at the Getty Research Institute. He lives in Brooklyn.

INTRODUCTION

Learning How to Die – Socrates
To Die Laughing
Writing about Dead Philosophers

190 OR SO DEAD PHILOSOPHERS

Pre-Socratics, Physiologists, Sages and Sophists
Thales • Solon • Chilon • Periander •
Epimenides • Anaximander • Pythagoras •
Timycha • Heracleitus • Aeschylus •
Anaxagoras • Parmenides • Zeno of Elea •
Empedocles • Archelaus • Protagoras •
Democritus • Prodicus

Platonists, Cyrenaics, Aristotelians and Cynics
Plato • Speusippus • Xenocrates •
Arcesilaus • Carneades • Hegesias •
Aristotle • Theophrastus • Strato • Lyco •
Demetrius • Antisthenes • Diogenes •
Crates of Thebes • Hipparchia •
Metrocles • Menippus

Sceptics, Stoics and Epicureans
Anaxarchus • Pyrrho • Zeno of Citium •
Ariston • Dionysius • Cleanthes •
Chrysippus • Epicurus • Lucretius

Classical Chinese Philosophers
Kongzi (Confucius) • Laozi (Lao Tzu) • Mozi •
Mengzi (Mencius) • Zhuangzi (Chuang Tzu) •
Han Feizi • Zen and the Art of Dying

Romans (Serious and Ridiculous) and Neoplatonists
Cicero • Seneca • Petronius • Epictetus •
Polemo of Laodicea • Peregrinus Proteus •
Marcus Aurelius • Plotinus • Hypatia

The Deaths of Christian Saints
St. Paul • Origen • St. Antony •
St. Gregory of Nyssa • St. Augustine • Boethius

Medieval Philosophers: Christian, Islamic and Judaic
The Venerable Bede • John Scottus Eriugena •
Al-Farabi • Avicenna (Ibn Sina) • St. Anselm •
Solomon Ibn Gabirol • Abelard •
Averroës (Ibn Rushd) • Moses Maimonides •
Shahab al-din Suhrawardi

Philosophy in the Latin Middle Ages
Albert the Great • St. Thomas Aquinas •
St. Bonaventure • Ramon Llull •
Siger of Brabant • St. John Duns Scotus •
William of Ockham

Renaissance, Reformation and Scientific Revolution
Marsilio Ficino • Pico della Mirandola •
Machiavelli • Erasmus • St. Thomas More •
Luther • Copernicus • Tycho Brahe •
Petrus Ramus • Montaigne • Giordano Bruno •
Galileo • Bacon • Campanella

Rationalists (Material and Immaterial), Empiricists
and Religious Dissenters
Grotius • Hobbes • Descartes •
Princess Elizabeth of Bohemia • Gassendi •
La Rochefoucauld • Pascal • Geulincx •
Anne Conway • Locke • Damaris Cudworth •
Spinoza • Malebranche • Leibniz •
Vico • Shaftesbury • Toland • Berkeley

Philosophes, Materialists and Sentimentalists
Montesquieu • Voltaire • Radicati di Passerano •
Madame du Châtelet • La Mettrie • Hume • Rousseau •
Diderot

Many Germans and Some Non-Germans
Winckelmann • Kant • Burke •
Wollstonecraft • Condorcet • Bentham •
Goethe • Schiller • Fichte • Hegel •
Hölderlin • Schelling • Novalis • Kleist •
Schopenhauer • Heine • Feuerbach • Stirner

The Masters of Suspicion and Some
Unsuspicious Americans
Emerson • Thoreau • Mill • Darwin •
Kierkegaard • Marx • William James •
Nietzsche • Freud • Bergson • Dewey

The Long Twentieth Century I: Philosophy in Wartime
Husserl • Santayana • Croce •
Gentile • Gramsci • Russell • Schlick •
Lukács • Rosenzweig • Wittgenstein •
Heidegger • Carnap • Edith Stein • Benjamin

The Long Twentieth Century II: Analytics, Continentals,
a Few Moribunds and a Near-death Experience
Gadamer • Lacan • Adorno • Levinas • Sartre • Beauvoir •
Arendt • Merleau-Ponty • Quine • Weil • Ayer • Camus •
Ricoeur • Barthes • Davidson • Althusser • Rawls •
Lyotard • Fanon • Deleuze • Foucault • Baudrillard •
Derrida • Debord • Dominique Janicaud •
Simon Critchley

LAST WORDS
Creatureliness

GEOGRAPHICAL DETAILS AND THANKS
BIBLIOGRAPHY