Leary will always be remembered as the high-priest of LSD - but he was so much more than that. A high-ranking academic Harvard psychologist, his first acquaintance with the drug was through legitimate, government funded psychological experiments, and it was only later that he broke ranks to join the growing counter-culture, famously advising people to "Tune in, turn on, drop out" of the authoritarian, capitalist death machine that he had up until that point been in service of. His autobiography - brilliantly entitled "Flashbacks"! - is well worth a read, and underlines just how much more interesting Leary the person was than Leary the myth.

Design for Dying is his last book, written as he was dying of cancer, and published posthumously. It is a wild ride, ranging through a critique of conventional Western attitudes to death, how we are trapped linguistically and ideologically in a restricted sense of self, and the various alternatives, both philosophical and technological. The latter alternatives come under the transhumanist umbrella: cryonic preservation of the corpse until science can resurrect us; the use of nanotechnology to rebuild dead cells; the digitisation of consciousness and upload to a computer; and so on. At the end, however, while he seemed to have planned to have his head cryogenically frozen, he ultimately backed out. His last words were apparently "Why not?", an utterance as enigmatic as the man himself.

Gareth Southwell is a philosopher, writer and illustrator.