I don’t want to reveal any names, but I was recently told that Simon Critchley, following a conference somewhere on the Iberian Peninsula, invited another philosopher to go see the Chemical Brothers, as he had an extra ticket. At the concert the second philosopher suffered a mild heart attack and was forced to cancel all upcoming lecturing and teaching in order to recuperate. Ironically this was just a few days before Granta was set to release Critchley’s brilliant The Book of Dead Philosophers in the UK.

As its title suggests, The Book of Dead Philosophers catalogues the deaths of nearly two hundred philosophers from the pre-Socratics to Jean Baudrillard, who passed away in 2007. These deaths go from the spectacular to the bizarre to the banal. Zeno of Elea (995-430 BC), the originator of Zeno’s paradoxes, was stabbed to death while attempting to bite the ear off of the tyrant Nearchus. Pythagoras (who never actually existed) found having his throat slit preferable to crossing a bean field, while numerous other philosophers died of old age or cancer.

Dying at a Chemical Brothers concert would rival Heraclitus dying in cow dung (there are two competing stories: the dung was wet and he drowned, it was dry and he baked to death under the hot sun) in terms of its indignity and Rousseau dying of cerebral bleeding after being knocked unconscious after colliding with a Great Dane in its idiocy. (Although, all of this would unquestionably be topped by the death of Nietzsche, had Richard Wagner been correct in this opinion that the ill health that led to the death of his one time friend in 1900 was due to excessive masturbation – it was actually the result of a syphilitic infection he had contracted in a Cologne brothel in 1865.)

Then there are philosophers like the English utilitarian Jeremy Bentham, whose death was relatively boring but whose corpse continues to lead an interesting afterlife. When he died in 1832 he gave precise instructions for what should be done with his body so that he could continue to be a servant of science even in his death. His body was dissected, stuffed with straw, and dressed in his favorite outfit. He requested to be sat in a chair, in the position in which he would think, and put on display at University College London. Not only was his corpse shown on campus, but it was rolled out for College Council meetings. When it came time to vote on various issues Bentham was recorded as present but abstaining from voting. Initially his entire body was to be displayed, but the mummification process went wrong and a wax head was placed on his body and his real head was put in a jar between his legs. After being victim of various student pranks – his head was once found in a bus locker in Aberdeen, another time it was used as a soccer ball ­­– the head his now in storage.

Adorno, who I had heard died of a heart attack when a student radical flashed her breasts during a lecture, actually died of a heart attack a few days afterwards following heart palpitations while hiking. Not only that, but Critchley maintains that Adorno, often known as a cranky old snob who hated jazz and claimed that every film he saw made him “stupider and worse”, actually was quite the man about town during his time in LA, paling around with Greta Garbo and Charlie Chaplin, and had his share of extramarital affairs.

Critchley also discusses the core of most of the philosophers’ positions and their attitudes towards death. From the hilariously pessimistic Schopenhauer – “We begin in the madness of carnal desire and the transport of voluptuousness, we end in the dissolution of all our parts and the musty stench of corpses.” ­– to Deleuze’s considerably more affirmative vitalism. (I found the closing of Jean-Francois Lyotard’s obituary for Deleuze one of the most moving passages in the book: “He was too tough to experience disappointments and resentments – negative affections. In this nihilist fin-de-siècle, he was affirmation. Right through to illness and death. Why did I speak of him in the past? He laughed. He is laughing. He is here. It’s your sadness, idiot, he’d say.”)

I was recently in a seminar when someone claimed that Foucault’s interest in S&M and practices like fisting while in San Francisco in the late 1970s and early 1980s should be completely jettisoned from any discussion of the later volumes of his The History of Sexuality, which he was working on at the time. While there is certainly something to be said for a unmediated encounter with a work, the cumulative entries of The Book of Dead Philosophers remind one of the both ways their theories informed their lives and the importance these thinkers put on their theories: many risked their lives with their positions: Socrates, Spinoza, etc.

The genius of the book is the way it balances these amusing anecdotes with the unrelenting weight of the total and utter annihilation that awaits us all. As much as philosophy has been about the search for the good life, it has been preoccupied since its foundation with death. The power of the anecdotes is the way they demonstrate the ways in which these preoccupations are not mere subjects for contemplation, but creep into the being of these thinkers, influencing their lives and deaths.

Get the book to read the story of the 77-year-old British positivist AJ Ayer saving a young Naomi Campbell from the clutches of then heavyweight champion of the world Mike Tyson at a Fernando Sanchez party in Manhattan in 1987. I’m waiting for the sexual lives of philosophers in order to, besides finding enlightenment and edification in their writings on sexuality, find out if Kant and Hume actually died virgins.