The Book of Dead Philosophers

A book of short entries on how more than 190 philosophers died, and what their deaths and their attitudes to death reveal about their thought. Critchley starts from an old idea found in Plato's Phaedo, in Cicero and in Montaigne: that to philosophise is to learn how to die. He argues that modern Western culture is marked by a deep fear of death, and that the philosophers can help us face it. The entries run in rough chronological order, from the Pre-Socratics through the ancient schools, early Christian and medieval thinkers, the early modern and Enlightenment philosophers, and on into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Some deaths are legendary or comic, such as the story that Empedocles threw himself into Mount Etna, or the preserved body of Jeremy Bentham kept at University College London. Others are grim, quiet or brave. The tone mixes learning with dark humour, and the short entries make the book easy to read in fragments.

It is an unusual and memorable way into the history of philosophy, and an invitation to think about one's own mortality with less fear.