What do Socrates, Hypatia, Giordano Bruno, Thomas More, and Jan Patočka have in common? They all once faced the most difficult choice of all: die faithful to their ideas, or renounce them and remain alive. And each of them chose death. Death became not only an integral part of their biographies but also a philosophical statement—a testament in the truest sense of the word. "Socrates may have never written a single line, but his death is one of the greatest philosophical bestsellers of all time." Kostika Bradatan's book, Dying for Ideas, explores the ultimate situation philosophers find themselves in when their dying bodies and the public spectacle of their deaths become their final means of persuading themselves. Drawing primarily on the history of philosophy, the work offers an interdisciplinary approach to the central problem. This book is about Socrates and Heidegger, but also about Gandhi's "fast unto death" and the self-immolation of a Buddhist monk, about Girard and Pasolini, self-improvement, and the art of the essay. According to the author, philosophy should not be merely an academic exercise, but an art of living, and any art of living is accompanied by an art of dying. Kostika Bradatan is a renowned contemporary American philosopher and professor at the Honors College at Texas Tech University.