Philosophers' Last Chapter: How Great Minds Departed

By Monica M

 The lives of philosophers are interesting. Often we focus on their life and writings and ignore the facts of how they ended their life journey. Here is an attempt to list out philosophers and how they  died.




Heraclitus: Dropsy (edema)

Parmenides: Natural causes (aged around 65)

Socrates: Execution by consuming poison hemlock Protagoras: Uncertain, traditional accounts vary Plato: Natural causes (aged around 80)

Diogenes of Sinope: Uncertain, possible cause is voluntary starvation (aged around 89)

Aristotle: Natural causes (aged 62)

Zeno of Elea: Tortured to death for plotting against a tyrant

Pyrrho: Natural causes (aged around 90)

Epicurus: Kidney stones and complications from dysentery

Confucius: Natural causes (aged around 72 or 73)

Plotinus: Natural causes, possibly leprosy (aged around 66)

Marcus Aurelius: Natural causes, possibly the Antonine Plague

Augustine of Hippo: Natural causes (aged 75) Boethius: Execution (beheaded) on charges of treason

Shankara: Uncertain, traditional accounts vary Al-Farabi: Natural causes (aged around 80) Ramanuja: Natural causes (aged 120)

Al-Ghazali: Natural causes (aged around 53) Maimonides: Natural causes (aged 69)

Roger Bacon: Natural causes (aged around 80)

Thomas Aquinas: Natural causes or illness (aged 49)

John Duns Scotus: Possibly from an apoplectic stroke (aged 42 or 43)

William of Ockham: Black Death (plague) (aged around 60)

Madhva: Natural causes (aged around 80)

Niccolò Machiavelli: Natural causes (aged 58) 

Thomas More: Execution by beheading

Francis Bacon: Pneumonia (aged 65)

Giordano Bruno: Execution (burned at the stake) for heresy

Galileo Galilei: Fever and heart palpitations (aged 77) Thomas Hobbes: Stroke (aged 91) 

René Descartes: Pneumonia (aged 53) 

Blaise Pascal: Stomach cancer (aged 39)

Baruch Spinoza: Lung illness, possibly tuberculosis or silicosis (aged 44)

John Locke: Natural causes (aged 72)

George Berkeley: Natural causes (aged 67)

Voltaire: Natural causes (aged 83)

David Hume: Suspected bowel cancer (aged 65) Jean-Jacques Rousseau: Stroke or infection following a fall (aged 66)

Denis Diderot: Pulmonary thrombosis (aged 70) Adam Smith: Illness, possibly dysentery (aged 67) Immanuel Kant: Natural causes (aged 79)

Thomas Paine: Natural causes, possibly stomach cancer (aged 72)

Jeremy Bentham: Natural causes (aged 84)

Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel: Cholera (aged 61)

Raja Ram Mohan Roy: Meningitis (aged 61)

Arthur Schopenhauer: Heart failure (aged 72)

Mary Wollstonecraft: Septicemia following childbirth (aged 38)

Friedrich Nietzsche: Pneumonia and multiple strokes (aged 55)

Karl Marx: Bronchitis and pleurisy (aged 64)

John Stuart Mill: Erysipelas (a skin infection) (aged 66)

Soren Kierkegaard: Complications from a fall, possibly a spinal disease (aged 42)

William James: Heart failure (aged 68)

Edmund Husserl: Pleurisy (aged 79)

Henri Bergson: Complications from bronchitis (aged 81)

Emile Durkheim: Stroke (aged 59)

Swami Vivekananda: Possibly due to heart failure (aged 39)

Max Weber: Pneumonia (aged 56)

Mahatma Gandhi: Assassinated by Nathuram Godse (aged 78)

Bertrand Russell: Influenza (aged 97)

Sri Aurobindo: Kidney failure (aged 78)

Sarvepalli Radhakrishnan: Natural causes (aged 86) Ludwig Wittgenstein: Prostate cancer (aged 62)

Karl Jaspers: Natural causes (aged 86)

Jiddu Krishnamurti: Pancreatic cancer (aged 90) Simone de Beauvoir: Pneumonia (aged 78)

Jean-Paul Sartre: Edema of the lung (aged 74) Hannah Arendt: Heart attack (aged 69)

John Rawls: Heart failure (aged 81)

Michel Foucault: Complications from AIDS (aged 57) Jacques Derrida: Pancreatic cancer (aged 74)

Jean le Rond d'Alembert: Bladder illness (aged 65) Johann Gottlieb Fichte: Typhus (aged 51)

Auguste Comte: Stomach cancer (aged 59)

John Dewey: Pneumonia (aged 92)

Alfred North Whitehead: Heart failure (aged 86) Rudolf Carnap: Natural causes (aged 79)

Theodor Adorno: Heart attack (aged 65)

Herbert Marcuse: Stroke (aged 81)

Hans-Georg Gadamer: Natural causes (aged 102)

Isaiah Berlin: Natural causes (aged 88)

Jacques Lacan: Colon cancer (aged 80)

Gilles Deleuze: Suicide (aged 70)

Paul Ricœur: Natural causes (aged 92)

Emmanuel Levinas: Natural causes (aged 89)

Karl Popper: Complications from cancer (aged 92) Albert Camus: Car accident (aged 46)

Maurice Merleau-Ponty: Heart attack (aged 53) Alfred Jules Ayer: Pneumonia (aged 78)

G.E. Moore: Natural causes (aged 84)

George Santayana: Stomach cancer (aged 88) Pierre Teilhard de Chardin: Heart attack (aged 73)

Richard Rorty: Pancreatic cancer (aged 75)


It is evident that the years of life don't determine the greatness of a philosopher. Some philosophers with very short lifespans have contributed more than anybody else. It is the passion they had for philosophy that determined the greatness of their contributions.

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