Author(s): Simon Critchley

Philosophy

Diogenes died by holding his breath. 
Plato allegedly died of a lice infestation.
Diderot choked to death on an apricot.

Nietzsche made a long, soft-brained and dribbling descent into oblivion after kissing a horse in Turin.

From the self-mocking haikus of Zen masters on their deathbeds to the last words (gasps) of modern-day sages, The Book of Dead Philosophers chronicles the deaths of almost 200 philosophers-tales of weirdness, madness, suicide, murder, pathos and bad luck.

In this elegant and amusing book, Simon Critchley argues that the question of what constitutes a 'good death' has been the central preoccupation of philosophy since ancient times. As he brilliantly demonstrates, looking at what the great thinkers have said about death inspires a life-affirming enquiry into the meaning and possibility of human happiness.

In learning how to die, we learn how to live.

Review: "A provocative and engrossing invitation to think about the human condition and what philosophy can and can't do to illuminate it."
-The Financial Times
"Rigorous, profound and frequently hilarious. . . . Critchley is an engaging, deadpan guide to the metaphysical necropolis. . . . At a time when much popular philosophy is either frivolous, dull or complacent, his is a bracingly serious and properly comic presence."-The Daily Telegraph (UK)

Contents: 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 * Averroes (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 Chatelet * La Mettrie * Hume * Rousseau * Diderot
Many Germans and Some Non-Germans
Winckelmann * Kant * Burke * Wollstonecraft * Condorcet * Bentham * Goethe * Schiller * Fichte * Hegel *
Hoelderlin * 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 * Lukacs * 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

Author Biography: Simon Critchley is Hans Jonas Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. His many books include Very Little . . . Almost Nothing, The Faith of the Faithless, and The Book of Dead Philosophers. He is the series moderator of The Stone, a philosophy column in The New York Times, to which he is a frequent contributor.