At the start of his latest book, In Praise of Failure: Four Lessons in Humility, the philosopher Costica Bradatan notes without chagrin that when we consider our origins and our ultimate fate, humans are not very impressive. We are designed to fail, he emphasises, and death is the framework for all our attempts to make something of ourselves.

In a previous book, Dying for Ideas, he considered how philosophers across the ages wrestled with mortality. In In Praise of Failure, he looks at how various thinkers – Seneca, Mohandas Gandhi, Simone Weil, Emil Cioran, Yukio Mishima – detached themselves from an obsessive drive for worldly success by reckoning with failure and death.

Washington Post