The definitive scholarly edition and new translation of all three versions of Hölderlin’s poem, The Death of Empedocles, and his related theoretical essays.

Brings to vivid life the connections between philosophy and biography by examining the spectacular--and often wildly implausible--biographies of famous pre-Socratic thinkers

Diogenes died by holding his breath. Plato allegedly died of a lice infestation. Diderot choked to death on an apricot. Nietzsche made a long, soft-brained and dribbling descent into oblivion after kissing a horse in Turin. From the self-mocking haikus of Zen masters on their deathbeds to the last words (gasps) of modern-day sages, The Book of Dead Philosophers chronicles the deaths of almost 200 philosophers-tales of weirdness, madness, suicide, murder, pathos and bad luck. In this elegant and amusing book, Simon Critchley argues that the question of what constitutes a 'good death' has been the central preoccupation of philosophy since ancient times. As he brilliantly demonstrates, looking at what the great thinkers have said about death inspires a life-affirming enquiry into the meaning and possibility of human happiness. In learning how to die, we learn how to live.

More specifically, he traces for the first time a line of transmission from Empedocles and the early Pythagoreans down to southern Egypt, and from there into the world of Islam. "Highly polemical new book ... The thesis is argued with immense learning." "Times Higher Education Supplement".

The definitive scholarly edition and new translation of all three versions of Hölderlin’s poem, The Death of Empedocles, and his related theoretical essays.

Exposes the core of tragic absolutes in German Romantic and Idealist philosophy.

Provides an accessible account of the variety and subtlety of Greek and Roman philosophy of death, from Homer to Marcus Aurelius.

In our age of climate change, the work of the decidedly philosophical poet Friedrich Holderlin has gained renewed urgency with its emphasis on the forces of nature that produce life and at the same time threaten to devour it. At the heart of his work lies an understanding of nature and the role that consciousness plays within it. This responds to, but also revises, the concerns of 18th and 19th-century philosophy of nature.This collection of 15 essays by distinguished international scholars reconsiders what his work reveals about the impulses toward form and formlessness in nature and the role that poetry plays in creating Holderlin's 'harmonious opposition'. The collection shows that Hlderlin anticipates many of the concerns that motivate contemporary environmental thinking.

Empedocles was a Greek pre-Socratic philosopher and a citizen of Acragas (Agrigentum), a Greek city in Sicily. Empedocles' philosophy is best known for originating the cosmogenic theory of the four classical elements. He also proposed forces he called Love and Strife which would mix as well as separate the elements. These physical speculations were part of a history of the universe which also dealt with the origin and development of life. Influenced by the Pythagoreans, Empedocles was a vegetarian who supported the doctrine of reincarnation. He is generally considered the last Greek philosopher to have recorded his ideas in verse. Some of his work survives, more than is the case for any other pre-Socratic philosopher. Empedocles' death was mythologized by ancient writers, and has been the subject of a number of literary treatments.