“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)
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
