The Book of Dead Philosophers

by CRITCHLEY, SIMON

• ISBN13: 9780307390431
• ISBN10: 0307390438
• Edition: Original
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2009-02-10
• Publisher: Vintage

Summary

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.

Author Biography

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.

Table of 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 •
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

Excerpts

Pre-Socratics, Physiologists, Sages and Sophists

Philosophical thought emerged in the Greek-speaking world two and a half millennia ago. First we encounter the various sages and so- called “physiologists,” like Thales and Anaxagoras, who attempted to explain the origins of the universe and the causes of nature. We will then turn to the sometimes shadowy figures, like Pythagoras, Heracleitus and Empedocles, who define the world of thought prior to the birth of Socrates and the struggle between philosophy and sophistry in Athens during the Classical period of the fifth and fourth centuries bc.

Of course, one might with some justice claim that the Sphinx was the first philosopher and Oedipus the second. This would also have the merit of making philosophy begin with a woman and continuing with an incestuous parricide. The Sphinx asks her visitors a question, which is also a riddle, and perhaps even a joke: what goes on four legs in the morning, on two legs at noon, and on three legs in the evening? If they get the answer wrong, she kills them. Furthermore, when Oedipus guesses the right answer to the riddle—man crawls on all fours as a baby, walks on two legs as an adult and with a cane in old age—the Sphinx commits philosophical suicide by throwing herself to the ground from her high rock.

Thales

(flourished in the sixth century bc)

Thales came from the once mighty port of Miletus, close to the present Turkish coast, whose harbour long ago dried up thanks to the unending attention of silt.

Thales was the possible originator of the saying “know thyself,” who famously predicted the solar eclipse of May 585 bc. He believed that water was the universal substance and once fell into a ditch when he was taken outdoors by a Thracian girl to look at the stars. On hearing his cry, she said, “How can you expect to know about all the heavens, Thales, when you cannot even see what is just beneath your feet?” Some feel—perhaps rightly—that this is a charge that philosophy never entirely escaped in the following two and a half millennia.

Thales died at an advanced age of heat, thirst and weakness while watching an athletic contest. This inspired Diogenes Laertius to the following execrable verse:

As Thales watched the games one festal day The fierce sun smote him and he passed away.

Solon

(630–560 bc)

Solon was a famed Athenian legislator who repealed the bloody laws of Dracon (although it was Dracon whose name was turned into an adjective). Plutarch remarks that Solon suggested that brides should nibble a quince before getting into bed. The reason for this is unclear. When Solon was asked why he had not framed a law against parricide, he replied that he hoped it was unnecessary. He died in Cyprus at the age of eighty.

Chilon

(flourished in the sixth century bc)

A Spartan to whom the saying “know thyself” is also sometimes attributed. He died after congratulating his son on an Olympic victory in boxing.

Periander

(628–588 bc)

Like Thales, Solon and Chilon, Periander of Corinth was considered one of the Seven Sages of Greece. To others, like Aristotle, he was simply a tyrant. However, there is a bizarre story about the lengths to which Periander went in order to conceal his place of burial: he instructed two young men to meet a third man at a predetermined place and kill and bury him. Then he arranged for four men to pursue the first two and kill and bury them. Then he arranged for a larger group of men to hunt down the four. Having made all these preparations, he went out to meet the two young men for he, Periander, was the third man.

Epimenides

(possibly flourished in the sixth century,

possibly a mythical figure)

A native of Crete, the setting for Epimenides’ famous paradox. Epimenides’ original statemen

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Excerpted from The Book of Dead Philosophers by Simon Critchley
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