Dying for Ideas

The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers

Costica Bradatan (Autor)

Buch | Hardcover

256 Seiten

2015
Bloomsbury Academic (Verlag)
978-1-4725-2551-2 (ISBN)

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What do Socrates, Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Thomas More, and Jan Patocka have in common? First, they were all faced one day with the most difficult of choices: stay faithful to your ideas and die or renounce them and stay alive. Second, they all chose to die. Their spectacular deaths have become not only an integral part of their biographies, but are also inseparable from their work. A "death for ideas" is a piece of philosophical work in its own right; Socrates may have never written a line, but his death 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 as seen 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; finally, the philosophers' 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. This is a book about Socrates and Heidegger, but also about Gandhi's "fasting unto death" and self-immolation; about Girard and Passolini, and self-fashioning and the art of the essay.

Costica Bradatan is Associate Professor of Humanities in the Honors College at Texas Tech University and Honorary Research Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Queensland, Australia. He is the author and editor of eight books, and has written for The New York Times, The New Statesman, Times Literary Supplement, Dissent, Boston Review, Christian Science Monitor, The Globe & Mail amongst others. Bradatan serves as the Religion/Comparative Studies Editor for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Acknowledgments
Introduction
1. Philosophy as Self-fashioning
2. The First Layer
3. Philosophy in the Flesh
4. The Second Layer
5. The Making of a Martyr-Philosopher
Postscript: To Die Laughing
Bibliography
Index

Erscheint lt. Verlag	26.2.2015
Zusatzinfo	10 bw illus
Verlagsort	London
Sprache	englisch
Maße	138 x 216 mm
Gewicht	445 g
Themenwelt	Geisteswissenschaften ► Geschichte ► Geschichtstheorie / Historik
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Geschichte der Philosophie
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie Altertum / Antike
	Geisteswissenschaften ► Philosophie ► Philosophie der Neuzeit
	Sozialwissenschaften ► Soziologie ► Mikrosoziologie
ISBN-10	1-4725-2551-5 / 1472525515
ISBN-13	978-1-4725-2551-2 / 9781472525512
Zustand	Neuware