Simon Critchley

Simon Critchley is an English philosopher working in the continental tradition, Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research in New York. He taught for many years at the University of Essex. His early work on Derrida and Levinas explored the ethics of deconstruction, and Infinitely Demanding (2007) developed an ethics of commitment and a politics of resistance. He writes widely for general readers on death, religion, tragedy, football and David Bowie. The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008) recounts how around 190 philosophers died, to ask what it means to learn how to die.

Key ideas

• Philosophy begins in disappointment, both religious (loss of meaning) and political (injustice in the world).
• Ethics rests on an infinite demand from others that we can never fully meet, an idea drawn from Levinas.
• To philosophise is to learn how to die, as Cicero and Montaigne put it: to accept our finitude without fear.
• Laughter and tragedy both reveal the limits of human control and self-understanding.

Major works

• The Book of Dead Philosophers (2008)
• The Ethics of Deconstruction: Derrida and Levinas (1992)
• Very Little... Almost Nothing (1997)
• Infinitely Demanding (2007)
• Tragedy, the Greeks, and Us (2019)

In the Book corner

• The Book of Dead Philosophers 2008 · Beginner
  A book of short entries on how more than 190 philosophers died, and what their deaths and their attitudes to death reveal…

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