Vendor
	Liepman Literary Agency Marc Koralnik
Original language
English
Weblink
http://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/dyi …

DYING FOR IDEAS.

Costica Bradatan

The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers

An engaging and thought-provoking journey through the history of philosophy and philosophers who died for ideas.

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 in the Honors College at Texas Tech University, USA.

Available products
Book Published 2015-02-01 by Bloomsbury Academic

Comments

Dying for Ideas: The Dangerous Lives of the Philosophers [is] a stimulating spiritual journey through an essential topic of human existence, and a reading of the history of human vision about it... Bradatan's highly intelligent and challenging book is an exemplary scrutiny of the life of the human mind, the human soul and body.

Written with verve and humor, at once deeply learned and wickedly ironic, this book explores how philosophy is not only an art of living but also an art of dying - and dying well! Original and irreverent! Seyla Benhabib, Eugene Meyer Professor for Political Science and Philosophy, Yale University, USA

Accessible, penetrating and erudite, [Dying For Ideas is] a beautifully written book which reveals that philosophy is not about academics grinding out dry papers but about mortals confronting the truths of the human condition in order to develop an art of living ... Bradatan has achieved something special in writing this book. As a comprehensive philosophy of death, it amounts to a profound philosophy of the true nature of philosophy itself

Nha Nam Publishing and Communications Joint Stock Company

Carbonio Editore srl

An intriguing 'dramatic narrative' of philosophers' clash with death a book that is accessible to all philosophers, academic and non-academic alike. In this intelligent and artful account, [Bradatan] ranges from the ancient world to our own times, drawing on the stories of individual philosophers who defended and died for their beliefs ... Bradatan's rich examination of the philosopher's act of dying for ideas brings into focus the riskiness of living for them as well.

Uitgeverij Ten Have

Central Compliation & Translation Press

[Bradatan] argues persuasively that death is not simply the opposite of life, but that it enters life and lends it urgency that it can even 'breathe new life into life'.