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.

List

• 475 BCE - Neanthes of Cyzicus reported that Heraclitus died covered in dung after failing to cure himself of dropsy.^[1]
• 458 BCE – Zeno of Elea, according to Valerius Maximus, was tortured and killed by the tyrant Nearchus, after biting off the tyrant's ear.
• 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, at a wedding feast, or in his sleep.
• 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 state 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.
• 212 BCE – Archimedes was killed during the Siege of Syracuse by a Roman soldier despite orders that he should not be harmed.
• 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. (Debated).
• 43 BCE – Cicero while leaving his villa in Formiae was beheaded by two killers, allegedly sent by Marcus Antonius.
• 65 CE – Seneca was forced to commit suicide after falling out with Emperor Nero.
• 415 – Hypatia was lynched 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.
• 1204 - Maimonides died from exhaustion after extensive traveling.^[2]
• 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.
• 1487 – John Argyropoulos supposedly died of consuming too much watermelon.
• 1527 - Niccolò Machiavelli died of a stomach ailment at 58 years of age.^[3]
• 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.
• 1778 - Jean-Jacques Rousseau died of an apoplectic stroke.^[4]
• 1794 – The Marquis de Condorcet died in prison.
• 1814 – Johann Gottlieb Fichte died of typhus in Berlin, during the campaign against Napoleon.
• 1826 - Thomas Jefferson died of a complication of a variety of issues likely stemming from undiagnosed prostate cancer.^[5]
• 1831 – Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel died of a gastrointestinal disease during a cholera outbreak in Berlin.
• 1832 - Johann Wolfgang von Goethe died of a heart attack in Weimar.^[6]
• 1837 – Giacomo Leopardi died in Naples during a cholera epidemic, maybe by pulmonary edema.
• 1860 – Arthur Schopenhauer died of pulmonary-respiratory failure
• 1862 - Henry David Thoreau died of tuberculosis at the 44 years of age.^[7]
• 1864 – Ferdinand Lassalle died in a duel.
• 1866 – William Whewell was thrown from his horse and sustained fatal injuries.
• 1876 – Philipp Mainländer hanged himself in his residence in Offenbach
• 1882 - Ralph Waldo Emerson died of pneumonia ^[8]
• 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.
• 1916 – J. Howard Moore shot himself in Jackson Park, Chicago.^[9]
• 1917 – Adolf Reinach fell outside Diksmuide in Flanders during World War I.
• 1919 – Rosa Luxemburg was murdered by the Freikorps.
• 1924 – Vladimir Lenin died of a brain hemorrhage.
• 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 – Pavel Florensky was shot dead after being sentenced by an extrajudicial NKVD troika to death.
• 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.
• 1942 – Georges Politzer was executed by the Nazis.
• 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.
• 1951 – Ludwig Wittgenstein died of cancer in Ireland, three days after his 62nd birthday. His last words: "Tell them I've had a wonderful life."
• 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.^[10]
• 1960 – Albert Camus died in an automobile accident.
• 1961 – Maurice Merleau-Ponty died of a stroke while preparing a lecture on Descartes.
• 1963 - W. E. B. DuBois died of diphtheria in Ghana.^[11]
• 1969 – Theodor Adorno developed heart palpitations after attempting to climb a 3000-metre mountain, and subsequently suffered a heart attack.
• 1970 – Bertrand Russell died of the flu in Wales. There was no religious ceremony.
• 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 an apartment building.
• 1980 – Roland Barthes was struck in the street by a laundry van after leaving a luncheon with French President François Mitterrand.
• 1980 – Jean-Paul Sartre, a notorious chain-smoker, died of an edema of the lung.
• 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.
• 1986 – Simone de Beauvoir died of pneumonia.
• 1990 – Louis Althusser died of a heart attack.
• 1992 – Félix Guattari died of a heart attack.
• 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.
• 2000 – Willard Van Orman Quine died of Alzheimer's disease.
• 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.
• 2008 – David Foster Wallace hanged himself on the back porch of his house in Claremont, California.
• 2017 – Anne Dufourmantelle drowned while trying to rescue two children.^[12]
• 2017 – Mark Fisher committed suicide by hanging.
• 2019 – Ágnes Heller drowned in Lake Balaton near Balatonalmádi while she was swimming.
• 2020 – Bernard Stiegler committed suicide.
• 2022 – Darya Dugina was killed during a terrorist attack.
• 2022 – Saul Kripke died of pancreatic cancer.

References

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.