The Book of Dead Philosophers - Hardcover

Critchley, Simon

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1847080103 ISBN 13: 9781847080103

Publisher: Granta Books, 2008

Synopsis

Rare Book

About this title

Review:

Critchley's book will fascinate people curious about why we are here. -- Big Issue

Critchley's sketches of the lives and deaths of philosophers...are brilliant, entertaining, informative, and marked throughout by lightness and humour.
-- New Humanist

This ingenious primer collects potted biographies of 190 dead philosophers... It's packed with great stories
-- Time Out

This is a rigorous, profound and frequently hilarious book... Critchley himself is an engaging, deadpan guide to the metaphysical necropolis -- The Telegraph

While Citchley asks some big questions he also grants us a pick'n'mix of the most noteworthy demises in philosophical history.
-- The List

[The] book differs from more punitive tomes on popular philosophy not only in its accessibility but in its sprawling cast. -- The Sunday Herald

Synopsis:

Starting from the premise that philosophers' deaths have been as interesting as their lives, Simon Critchley pulls readers in with quirky stories of how philosophers died and then confronts the big themes - in this case, what 'a good death' means and how to live with the knowledge of death and free from what he calls 'delusions and sophistries'. The book consists of short, sometimes very short, entries on various philosophers, cataloguing the manner of their demises and linking this to their central ideas. These entries would run from a couple of sentences in the case of the Pre-Socratics or minor Medievals and Moderns, up to a paragraph or indeed short essays of about 800 words in the case, say, of Socrates, Seneca, Rousseau, Kant and Nietzsche. Some of the entries would be rather pithy and, hopefully, witty.The book would be framed with an Introduction, and a long concluding chapter on philosophy and death where I would seek to defend what I have already said about the ideal of the philosophical death as a way of denouncing contemporary delusions and sophistries, what Francis Bacon saw as the Idols of the Tribe, the Den, the Market-Place and the Theatre (incidentally, Bacon died in a particularly cold winter in London in 1626 from a cold contracted after trying to stuff a chicken with snow as an experiment in refrigeration).

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About this edition

• Publisher: Granta Books
• Publication date: 2008
• ISBN 10: 1847080103
• ISBN 13: 9781847080103
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 334