Are philosophers machines programmed to generate ideas? Or are they simply unfeeling academics? No, writes author Roger-Pol Droit, who argues that philosophers are adventurers whose field of experimentation is existence itself. The study of philosophers' lives leads to the realisation that philosophy is first an foremost a way of life. Philosophers are not exclusively concerned with the construction of theoretical systems. Their goal is also, quite simply, to conduct their own lives in an intelligent fashion, to try to behave according to the dictates of reason, and to combat unhappiness; these three aspects being of course related.
Roger-Pol Droit takes the reader on a voyage through time, spanning the centuries from Antiquity to the present, in a series of intellectual portraits of great and usual or remarkable thinkers, beginning with Socrates and Plato and ending with Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze. A major part of this volume is devoted to modern philosophers, from Kant to Heidegger.
The author's goal is to stimulate new thought and to bring to life for the reader the vital ideas of past thinkers.