Simon Critchley’s The Book of Dead Philosophers is a brisk and bracing catalogue of the last words and final moments of 190 great thinkers: from Goethe’s “Mehr licht” (“More light”) to Kant’s “Sufficit” (“It is enough”).
Most of the writers and philosophers you’ll meet here died in accordance with — or even because of — their beliefs: Seneca, who died at Nero’s behest, in A.D. 65, did so stoically. Diogenes is said to have committed suicide by holding his breath. And Bertrand Russell took comfort in the thought that “I shall rot and nothing of my ego will survive.” Critchley — a philosophy professor and the author of On Humor (2002) — negotiates 2,500 years’ worth of intellectual history gracefully, and his book about death gradually turns into a manual for the living. After all, as Seneca told us many lifetimes ago, “he will live badly who does not know how to die well.”
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