BA PDF Symposium 2006

26 April 2006

Abstracts

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Dr David Palfrey

How Philosophers Die: from Pythagoras's bean fields to Foucault's bath houses

The history of Western philosophy provides an extravagantly rich tableau of unusual death: self-starvations, murders, deaths by exposure and so on. Can these recurrent topoi be fitted into any general historical narrative of the 'philosophical tradition'? And do these proliferating representations tell us anything of human interest - about either philosophy or death? Ancient philosophy was clearly understood, after Socrates, as both a way of life and a way of death. Although philosophers, unlike military heroes, died at great age, they were consistently represented (as throughout Diogenes Laertius) as dying in extraordinary ways. Such classical models provided one context for Paul's representation of Christ's death. Yet Paul also, of course, claimed Christ's singular death to be a moment of universal significance in human history. This claim altered the terms on which Western philosophers approached their own death. Christian philosophers such as Augustine approached their death as a dual act of memory: memory of the past sins of an earthly life, and memory of Christ's earlier, saving, death. After Renaissance humanism recovered classical thought, secular philosophy reclaimed both death as an object of thought and dying as a practical philosophical activity. From the sixteenth to the nineteenth centuries, accounts of how philosophers died offer a vivid perspective upon philosophy's struggles with religious tradition, experimental science, and political authority. Twentieth-century genocide tragically forced death upon philosophers, as upon others, with little metaphysical discrimination. One way in which to view the separate trajectories of 'analytic' and 'Continental' philosophy is as different responses to this situation. Each respectively developed different components of classical and Christian philosophical responses to death and dying.

Dr David Palfrey studied Mathematics and History as an undergraduate at Trinity Hall, Cambridge, before undertaking postgraduate study at the Centre for History and Economics in Cambridge and the Centre for Philosophy of the Social and Natural Sciences at LSE. He completed his PhD in History at the University of Cambridge ( 'The moral sciences at Cambridge University, 1848-1860') and has held a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellowship there since October 2003.