DYING for Ideas is an engaging read. Accessible, penetrating and erudite, it’s a beautifully written book which reveals that philosophy is not about academics grinding out dry papers but about mortals confronting the truths of the human condition in order to develop an art of living.

Author Costica Bradatan, professor of philosophy at Texas Tech University, argues that death is central to the ethical question of how we should live because if one thing is certain it is that life is finite.

“As soon as man enters on life, he is at once old enough to die,” he writes. That is a thought that should be borne constantly in mind, not simply to avoid squandering our time but because doing so helps us live more honest, realistic and authentic lives.

Many people simply do not think about their mortality. For them, death is always something that happens to others. It always comes as a regrettable surprise and they are confounded by the imminence of their own death and meet it without dignity because, as Bradatan contends: “When death strikes … these people find themselves in the weakest of positions — the more extensive their ignorance of death before, the deeper their devastation now.

“Unprepared, unwarned, childish minds in grown-up bodies, they have now become death’s plaything.”

For Bradatan, the true philosopher is “an apprentice to death,” who studies its ways, meanings and inevitability, so that when the time comes (s)he will be ready to drop everything and say: “Let’s go. I was expecting you.”

Is there a danger here of becoming obsessively morbid? Not according to the author, who argues that the art of living may boil down to a “science of dosage” and “if you let too much death into your life you can poison it but if you don’t allow enough you can ruin it by living in a tasteless, insipid fashion.”

The heart of his book is an expert consideration of the martyr-philosopher, faced with having to die for his philosophy, or see it undermined and humiliated by his failure to do so and Socrates is, inevitably, the central character of Bradatan’s book.

How could this stubborn Athenian, who wrote nothing, not be — his noble death inspired Plato to abandon politics in favour of becoming the father of Western philosophy.

Bradatan also considers the deaths of several other martyr-philosophers such as Hypatia of Alexandria, Anicius Boethius, GE Moore, Jan Patocka and especially Giordano Bruno, who had the strength of will to be burnt alive for his philosophy.

But apart from such studies, Bradatan has achieved something special in writing this book. As a comprehensive philosophy of death, it amounts to a profound philosophy of the true nature of philosophy itself.