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.
• 212 BCE Archimedes 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.
• 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 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.
• 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.
• 1916 J. Howard Moore shot himself in Jackson Park, Chicago.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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.
• 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 his 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.
• 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.