Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers

Socrates, Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Thomas More, and Jan Patocka all chose to die for their ideas, making their deaths an integral part of their biographies and philosophical work. Dying for Ideas explores the limit-situation in which philosophers find themselves when the only means of persuasion they can use is their own dying bodies and the public spectacle of their death.

Format: Paperback / softback
Length: 256 pages
Publication date: 22 March 2018
Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing PLC

Socrates, Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Thomas More, and Jan Patocka were all faced with a difficult choice: stay faithful to their ideas and die, or renounce them and stay alive. Despite their intellectual brilliance, they all chose to die, and their deaths have become an integral part of their biographies and inseparable from their work. A death for ideas is a philosophical work in its own right, and Socrates, who never wrote a line, is one of the greatest philosophical best-sellers of all time. Dying for Ideas explores the limit situation in which philosophers find themselves when the only means of persuasion they can use is their own dying bodies and the public spectacle of their death. The book tells the story of the philosopher's encounter with death from several angles: the tradition of philosophy as an art of living, the body as the site of self-transcending, death as a classical philosophical topic, taming death and self-fashioning, and finally, the philosopher's scapegoating and their live performance of a martyr's death, followed by apotheosis and disappearance into myth. While rooted in the history of philosophy, Dying for Ideas is an exercise in breaking disciplinary boundaries. It explores the lives and ideas of Socrates, Heidegger, Gandhi, Girard, Passolini, and other philosophers, and how their deaths have shaped their philosophical legacies.

Socrates, Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Thomas More, and Jan Patocka were all faced with a difficult choice: stay faithful to their ideas and die, or renounce them and stay alive. Despite their intellectual brilliance, they all chose to die, and their deaths have become an integral part of their biographies and inseparable from their work. A death for ideas is a philosophical work in its own right, and Socrates, who never wrote a line, is one of the greatest philosophical best-sellers of all time. Dying for Ideas explores the limit situation in which philosophers find themselves when the only means of persuasion they can use is their own dying bodies and the public spectacle of their death. The book tells the story of the philosopher's encounter with death from several angles: the tradition of philosophy as an art of living, the body as the site of self-transcending, death as a classical philosophical topic, taming death and self-fashioning, and finally, the philosopher's scapegoating and their live performance of a martyr's death, followed by apotheosis and disappearance into myth. While rooted in the history of philosophy, Dying for Ideas is an exercise in breaking disciplinary boundaries. It explores the lives and ideas of Socrates, Heidegger, Gandhi, Girard, Passolini, and other philosophers, and how their deaths have shaped their philosophical legacies.

Weight: 336g
Dimension: 215 x 138 x 26 (mm)
ISBN-13: 9781472529718