What's the Meaning of Life? Turn to the Last Page

If death can be a funny sort of philosophical thing when you think about it -- and it can, just ask author Simon Critchley -- would that mean it gets funnier the more you think about it? And if you were a philosopher who spent most of your life thinking about its meaning, would that make your death funny?

Well, sure!

Take Avicenna, the Medieval Islamic philosopher. He had sex so often, his biographer noted, that he wound up with "colic," then gave himself eight enemas in one day as a cure. Even in this state, he "did not take care and frequently had sexual intercourse."

He died days later at 58.

Deep thinker Heraclitus of ancient Greece fame had himself covered in cow dung as a medicinal cure (you've got to wonder what ailment was worse), but alas, he suffocated in the stuff. Sigmund Freud, who famously observed that a cigar is sometimes just a cigar, failed to note they were bad for you, smoked up to 20 each day and died of cancer of the mouth.

These and other endings are the stuff of "The Book of Dead Philosophers," Critchley's ironic take on 3,000 years of philosophy and the demises of 190 of its greatest practitioners. It's a lot funnier than you'd think, in a Monty Python, "They're throwing cows at us!" kind of way. It's also strange, absurd, sad and bizarre, which makes it a lot like life, too.

Critchley, chairman of the philosophy department at the New School for Social Research in New York, worries that Western societies are coming unglued. New Age muddles, televangelists promising salvation after a tax-free donation, kitsch Buddhism, endless quests to find "self-meaning": All this metaphysical scrambling betrays a "profound terror of death and an overwhelming anxiety to be quite sure that death is not the end but the passage to the afterlife," he writes.

Philosophically speaking, this is not good. Philosophically speaking, you want to come to terms with the fact that, while reading this sentence, you just cashed in three seconds of the only life you'll ever live.

But by looking at the deaths (and lives, briefly) of the great philosophers, Critchley figures that our youth-worshiping, death-fearing society might buck up about our mortality. After all, philosophers should know something about facing death. Cicero observed that "to philosophize is to learn how to die," and Michel de Montaigne had it that "He who should teach men to die would at the same time teach them to live."

Montaigne, the hugely influential essayist of the French Renaissance, wrote in his autobiography that he wanted to die quietly. He died in 1592 of abscesses in his throat grown so large that they cut off his ability to speak.

His brother died after being hit in the head by a tennis ball.

Feel better?