Dying for ideas. About the dangerous life of philosophers. Bradatan K.

What is common between Socrates, Hipatia, Giordano Bruno, Thomas Mor and Jan Patochka? Once they all faced the most difficult choice: to die, remaining faithful to their ideas, or to renounce them and stay alive. And each of them chose death. Death became not only an integral part of their biographies, but also by a philosophical statement - a will in the most literal sense of the word. “Perhaps Socrates really never wrote a single line, but his death is one of the greatest philosophical bestsellers of all time.”

The book of Kostya Braudatan “Dying for ideas” explores the limiting situation in which philosophers find themselves when their own dying bodies and the public sight of their death become the last means of belief in their rightness. The work is based primarily on materials on the history of philosophy, but it offers an interdisciplinary approach to the central problem. This is a book about Socrates and Heidegger, but also about the “post to death” Gandhi and the self -immolation of the Buddhist monk, about Girard and Pazolini, about self -improvement and art of the essay. Philosophy, according to the author, should not only be an academic exercise, but the art of life, and any art of living is accompanied by the art of dying.

Kostya Bradatan - a famous modern American philosopher, professor of the Onors college at the Technological University of Texas.