Deaths of philosophers

The documented history of philosophy is often said to begin with the notable death of Socrates. Since that time, there have been many other noteworthy deaths of philosophers.

• 435 BCE According to legend, Empedocles leapt to his death into the crater of Etna.
• 420 BCE According to some reports, Protagoras died in a shipwreck.
• 399 BCE Socrates, condemned to death for corrupting the young, drank hemlock amongst his friends as described in Plato’s Phaedo.
• 348 BCE Plato either died while being serenaded by a Thracian flute-playing girl, or at a wedding feast.
• 338 BCE According to legend, Isocrates starved himself to death.
• 323 BCE Accounts differ regarding the death of Diogenes of Sinope. He is alleged to have died from eating raw octopus, from being bitten by a dog, and from holding his breath. He left instructions for his corpse to be left outside the city walls as a feast for the animals and birds.
• 320 BCE Ancient sources tell us that Nicocreon the tyrant had Anaxarchus pounded to death in a mortar with iron pestles; Anaxarchus is said to have made light of the punishment.
• 314 BCE Xenocrates died when he hit his head after tripping over a bronze pot.
• 270 BCE Epicurus died of kidney stones.
• 262 BCE Zeno of Citium founder of the Stoic philosophical school tripped and broke his toe and then died from holding his breath.
• 207 BCE Chrysippus is said to have died from laughter after giving wine to his donkey and seeing it attempt to eat figs.
• 52 BCE Lucretius is alleged to have killed himself after being driven mad by taking a love potion.
• 65 CE Seneca was forced to commit suicide after falling out with Emperor Nero.
• 415 Hypatia was killed by a mob of Christians.
• 430 Saint Augustine died in Hippo while the city was under siege by the Vandals.
• 526 Boethius was strangled on the orders of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric by whom he was employed.
• 1141 Judah Halevi was killed on a pilgrimage to Jerusalem.
• 1180 Abraham ibn Daud was martyred.
• 1277 Pope John XXI (usually identified with the logician Peter of Spain) was killed by the collapse of a roof.
• 1284 Siger of Brabant was stabbed to death by his clerk.
• 1415 Jan Hus was executed at the Council of Constance.
• 1535 Thomas More was executed by beheading in 1535 after he had fallen out of favour with King Henry VIII.
• 1572 Girolamo Maggi was executed by strangulation on the orders of a prison captain in Constantinople; Maggi had been incarcerated after being arrested during the Turkish siege of Famagusta.
• 1572 Peter Ramus was killed in the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
• 1600 Giordano Bruno was burnt by the Inquisition.
• 1619 Lucilio Vanini was also burnt by the Inquisition.
• 1626 Francis Bacon died of pneumonia, contracted while stuffing snow into a chicken as an experiment in refrigeration.
• 1640 Uriel da Costa, after being beaten and trampled by a religious group he had offended, went home and shot himself.
• 1650 René Descartes was killed by a cold acquired through his rising early to instruct Queen Christina of Sweden.
• 1677 Baruch Spinoza died of a pulmonary ailment, thought to be either tuberculosis or silicosis, brought on by inhaling glass dust while working as a lens grinder.
• 1683 Algernon Sidney was executed for treason.
• 1716 Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz died in Hanover on 14 November 1716 after a prolonged case of arthritis and gout. The only one to attend his funeral was his secretary, Johann Georg von Eckhart.
• 1794 The Marquis de Condorcet died in prison.
• 1814 Johann Gottlieb Fichte died of typhus in Berlin, during the campaign against Napoleon.
• 1831 Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel died of a gastrointestinal disease during a cholera outbreak in Berlin.
• 1837 Giacomo Leopardi died in Naples during a cholera epidemic, maybe by pulmonary edema.
• 1866 William Whewell was thrown from his horse and sustained fatal injuries.
• 1876 Philipp Mainländer hanged himself in his residence in Offenbach, using a pile of copies of The Philosophy of Redemption as a platform.
• 1882 William Jevons was drowned while bathing.
• 1900 Friedrich Nietzsche died after a mental breakdown.
• 1901 Paul Rée fell to his death from a mountain.
• 1903 Otto Weininger committed suicide by shooting himself.
• 1906 Ludwig Boltzmann hanged himself.
• 1910 Carlo Michelstaedter killed himself with a pistol he had in his house.
• 1911 Paul Lafargue died with his wife, Laura Marx, in a suicide pact.
• 1915 Emil Lask was killed in action as soldier in World War I.
• 1917 Adolf Reinach fell outside Diksmuide in Flanders during World War I.
• 1928 Alexander Bogdanov died as a result of one of his experiments in blood transfusion.
• 1930 Frank P. Ramsey died after "contracting jaundice" at the age of 26. (Jaundice by itself is not a cause of death but instead indicates hemolytic or hepatic disease.)
• 1931 Jacques Herbrand died in a mountaineering accident in the Alps at the age of 23.
• 1936 Moritz Schlick was murdered by an insane student.
• 1937 Gustav Shpet was executed after being accused of involvement in an anti-Soviet organization.
• 1937 Antonio Gramsci died during his imprisonment by Benito Mussolini.
• 1939 Stanisław Ignacy Witkiewicz committed suicide by taking an overdose of Veronal and trying to slit his wrists a day after the Soviet invasion of Poland; it was planned to be a joint suicide with a close friend of his but she survived the attempt.
• 1940 Walter Benjamin committed suicide at the Spanish-French border, after attempting to flee from the Nazis.
• 1940 Leon Trotsky was assassinated on Stalin's orders in Mexico, by Soviet agent Ramón Mercader, along with most of his family.
• 1941 Henri Bergson died of pneumonia in occupied Paris, which he supposedly contracted after standing in a queue for several hours in order to register as a Jew.
• 1941 Kurt Grelling was killed by the Nazis.
• 1941 Edith Stein died in a gas chamber in the Auschwitz concentration camp.
• 1943 Simone Weil starved herself to death.
• 1944 Jean Cavaillès was shot by the Gestapo.
• 1944 Marc Bloch was shot by the Gestapo for his work in the French Resistance.
• 1944 Giovanni Gentile was murdered by communist partisans.
• 1945 Dietrich Bonhoeffer was executed by hanging.
• 1945 Gerhard Gentzen was detained in a prison camp by the Russian forces, where he died of malnutrition.
• 1945 Ernst Bergmann committed suicide after the Allied forces captured Leipzig.
• 1945 Johan Huizinga died in De Steeg in Gelderland, near Arnhem, where he was held in detention by the Nazis.
• 1945 Miki Kiyoshi died in prison; he had been imprisoned after helping a friend on the run from the authorities.
• 1948 Mohandas Gandhi was shot and killed by a Hindu zealot.
• 1954 Alan Turing ate a cyanide-poisoned apple. He was believed at the time to have committed suicide due to chemical depression, but his death was possibly just an accident.^[1]
• 1960 Albert Camus died in an automobile accident.
• 1961 Maurice Merleau-Ponty died of a stroke while preparing a lecture on Descartes.
• 1969 Theodor Adorno developed heart palpitations after attempting to climb a 3000-metre mountain, and subsequently suffered a heart attack.
• 1971 Richard Montague was beaten to death, presumably by a male prostitute.
• 1973 Amílcar Cabral was assassinated while fighting for the independence of Portuguese colonies in Africa.
• 1977 Jan Patočka died of an apoplexy after having been interrogated by the Czechoslovak secret police for eleven hours.
• 1978 Kurt Gödel starved himself to death by refusing to eat for fear of being poisoned.
• 1979 Evald Ilyenkov committed suicide.
• 1979 Nicos Poulantzas committed suicide by jumping out of the twentieth floor of his apartment building.
• 1980 Roland Barthes was struck in the street by a laundry van after leaving a luncheon with French President François Mitterrand.
• 1983 Arthur Koestler committed joint suicide with his third wife, Cynthia, by taking an overdose of drugs after a painful struggle with disease.
• 1984 Michel Foucault was the first high-profile French personality to die of AIDS after contracting HIV.
• 1994 David Stove committed suicide by hanging himself after a painful struggle with disease.
• 1994 Sarah Kofman committed suicide on Nietzsche’s birthday.
• 1994 Guy Debord committed suicide by shooting himself after a painful struggle with polyneuritis.
• 1995 Gilles Deleuze committed suicide by jumping out of his fourth-story apartment window.
• 1998 Dimitris Liantinis committed suicide on the mountains of Taygetos.
• 2001 David Lewis died of diabetes related complications.
• 2004 Jacques Derrida died of pancreatic cancer.
• 2007 André Gorz committed joint suicide with his wife by lethal injection.

Further reading

• Ava Chitwood, Death by philosophy; University of Michigan Press, 2004.
• Simon Critchley, Book of Dead Philosophers; Vintage, 2009.
• David Palfrey, How Philosophers Die, British Academy Review, Issue 10 (2007)
• Anthony Quinton, 'Deaths of philosophers', The Oxford Companion to Philosophy; Oxford, 1995, 2005.

References