CAUSES OF DEATH OF PHILOSOPHERS

"Gentlemen, it is a fact that every philosopher of eminence for the last two centuries has either been murdered, or, at the least, been very near it, insomuch that if a man calls himself a philosopher, and never had his life attempted, rest assured there is nothing in him; and against Locke's philosophy in particular, I think it is an unanswerable objection (if we needed any) that, although he carried his throat about him in this world for seventy-two years, no man ever condescended to cut it." (Thomas de Quincey, 'Murder Considered as One of the Fine Arts')
  1. Abelard: Nun
  2. Adorno: Bad frankfurter
  3. Albert: Undermind
  4. Anaxagoras: Burned up
  5. Anaximander: Infinite causes
  6. Anaximenes: Evaporated
  7. Anscombe: By intention
  8. Anselm: Disease than which no deadlier can be conceived
  9. Aquinas: First causes
  10. Aristotle: Excessive moderation
  11. Armstrong: Indisposed
  12. Arrow: Voted out
  13. Augustine: Hippo
  14. Austin: Executionary act
  15. Bacon, F: Hit by idol in market place
  16. Bacon, J: De trope
  17. Barwise: Bad situation
  18. Belnap: Became irrelevant
  19. Benacerraf: Number was up
  20. Bennett: Taking the consequences
  21. Bentham: Fell off his stilts
  22. Bergson: Elan mortel
  23. Berkeley: Divine neglect
  24. Blackburn: Quasi-life
  25. Block: Trouble with bodily function
  26. Bradley: Absolutely everything
  27. Bratman: As planned
  28. Bruce Le Catt: Curiosity
  29. Burge: Something like arthritis
  30. Buridan: Asinine starvation
  31. Burke: Sublimated
  32. Calvin: Boredom
  33. Campbell, K: Epiphenomenal causes
  34. Camus: The plague
  35. Cantor: Set aside
  36. Carnap: Left the material mode
  37. Cartwright, N: Incapacitated
  38. Cartwright, R: Satisfied a negative existential
  39. Cassirer: Symbolic causes
  40. Chisholm: Lost his foundations
  41. Chomsky: Became past tense
  42. Christmas: Seasonally affective disorder
  43. Church: Recursive causes
  44. Churchland(s): Eliminated
  45. Coady: No telling
  46. Cohen, G: Missed the marks
  47. Collingwood: Entered history
  48. Comte: Went negative
  49. Copernicus: Revolution
  50. Cournot: Became too improbable
  51. Craig, E: Work of God
  52. Crane: Lost his representations
  53. Cresswell: Outmoded
  54. Dancy: No particular reason
  55. Danto: Artfully transfigured
  56. Darwin: Unfit
  57. Davidson: Unlawful causes
  58. Dawkins: Suicidal genes
  59. Democritus: Atomised
  60. Dennett: Lost consciousness
  61. Derrida: Deconstructed
  62. Descartes: Stopped thinking
  63. Devitt: Naturalised causes
  64. Devlin: Fell off Clapham omnibus
  65. Dewey: Became part of the environment
  66. Dingler: Unsuccessful experiments
  67. Diodorus: Mastered by the argument
  68. Dretske: No indications
  69. Dreyfus: Computerised
  70. Dudman: Conditional causes
  71. Dummett: Unverifiable causes
  72. Duns Scotus: Being univocal to an accident
  73. Durkheim: Suicide
  74. Dworkin: Lost his rights
  75. Earman: Inextendible world-line
  76. Einstein: Diced with God
  77. Eliot: Eructation of unhealthy souls
  78. Emmet: Passage of nature
  79. Empedocles: Cosmic cycle accident
  80. Epicurus: Nothing to worry about
  81. Feigl: Nomological dangler
  82. Feyerabend: Everything went
  83. Fichte: Non-ego takeover
  84. Field: Weight of numbers
  85. Fine: Shook up
  86. Flew: Met the great equaliser
  87. Fodor: Fell off Granny's knee
  88. Follesdal: Noematheosis
  89. Foot: Ungrounded
  90. Foucault: Disempowered
  91. Frankfurt: Revised his will
  92. Frege: Fell under a concept
  93. Freud: Slipped
  94. Gadamer: Lost horizons
  95. Galen: Lost his sense of humours
  96. Galileo: Stopped moving
  97. Gasset, Ortega y: Circumstancial
  98. Geach: Reference failure
  99. Gentzen: Cut turned septic
  100. Gettier: Fatal counter-example
  101. Gewirth: Dialectical necessity
  102. Glymour: Tripped over his own boostraps
  103. G?el: Became incomplete
  104. Goldman: Unknown internal causes
  105. Goodman: Gruesome bleen inflection
  106. Grosseteste: Encephalitis
  107. Grunbaum: Psyched out
  108. Gupta: Became unstable
  109. Habermas: A discourse condition
  110. Hare: Wrong prescription
  111. Haugeland: Entered excluded zone
  112. Heal: Dissimulation
  113. Hegel: Gave up the Geist
  114. Heidegger: Timeless causes
  115. Heisenberg: Uncertain causes
  116. Hempel: Explained away
  117. Heraclitus: Fell in the same river twice
  118. Hilbert: Informal causes
  119. Hinckfuss: Fit of morality
  120. Hintikka: Lost his normal forms
  121. Hobbes: Nasty causes
  122. Hofstadter: Holistic trap
  123. Honderich: Misunderstood causes
  124. Horwich: Deflated
  125. Hume: Turned an unknown shade of blue
  126. Husserl: Phenomenally bad luck
  127. Jackson: Saw red
  128. James, W: The will to leave
  129. Jaspers: Essence exhausted
  130. Jeffrey: Indecision
  131. Johnson, S: Kicked the bucket
  132. Kamp: Ran out of time
  133. Kant: Found the means to his own end
  134. Kaplan: This and that
  135. Katz: Decomposed
  136. Keynes: Too economical
  137. Kierkegaard: Sick to death
  138. Kim: Supervened on nothing
  139. Kitcher: Vaulting
  140. Korsgaard: Kant tell
  141. Koslow: Structural failure
  142. Kripke: Went rigid
  143. Kuhn: Paradigm lost
  144. Kyburg: Low frequency
  145. Lacan: Lack
  146. Lakatos: Degenerated
  147. La Mettrie: Machination
  148. Langer: Ran out of new keys
  149. Laplace: Prior arrangement
  150. Leibniz: Monadnucleosis
  151. Lesniewski: De-parted
  152. Levi: Contracted corpus
  153. Levina: Merged with others
  154. Levi-Strauss: Cooked
  155. Lewis, C I: No more givens
  156. Lewis, D: Joined his counterparts
  157. Lipton: Unexplained
  158. Locke: No idea
  159. Lovejoy: Being unchained
  160. Lucretius: Bumped off
  161. Luther: Diet of worms
  162. Lyotard: Post post-modernism
  163. Mach: Unsensational causes
  164. Machiavelli: Intriguing causes
  165. MacIntyre: After-virtue infection
  166. Mackie: An inus condition
  167. Maimonides: Lost his guide
  168. Malcolm: Undreamed of causes
  169. Malebranche: Occasional causes
  170. Marcuse: Became multi-dimensional
  171. Martin, C B: Lockejaw
  172. Marx: Material causes
  173. Matravers: Art attack
  174. Maxwell: Demonic possession
  175. McCall: Branch fell off
  176. McCulloch: Went out of his head
  177. McDowell: Left the space of reasons
  178. McGinn: Case closed
  179. McTaggart: Untimely causes
  180. Meinong: Lack of subsistence
  181. Mellor: By chance
  182. Merleau-Ponty: Perceptions blacked out
  183. Mill: Depsychologised
  184. Millikan: Devolved
  185. Montague: Disfunction
  186. Moore: By his own hand, obviously
  187. Nagel: Going nowhere
  188. Nerlich: Spaced out
  189. Neurath: Lost at sea
  190. Newcomb: Too boxed
  191. Newton: Kicked the bucket
  192. Nietzsche: Overpowered himself
  193. Noonan: Unidentified assailant
  194. Nozick: Lost track
  195. O'Shaughnessy: Lost the will
  196. Ockham: Shaved beyond necessity [or, cut while shaving]
  197. Oddie: Flew too close to the truth
  198. Paley: By design
  199. Papineau: Supernaturalised
  200. Parascelsus: Stabbed
  201. Parfit: Mistaken identity
  202. Parmenides: No one cause
  203. Pascal: The wagers of sin
  204. Passmore: 100 years of philosophy
  205. Pavlov: Reflexed
  206. Peacocke: Discontent
  207. Peirce: Abducted
  208. Penrose: Became computable
  209. Perry: Lost himself
  210. Pettit: Stopped responding
  211. Pherecydes: Lice
  212. Piaget: Undeveloped causes
  213. Place: Brained
  214. Plantinga: Of necessity
  215. Plato: Caved in
  216. Pollock: Defeated
  217. Popper: Falsified
  218. Price: Backward causes
  219. Priest: Became more dead than alive
  220. Prior: Past it
  221. Protagoras: Eaten by fish
  222. Putnam: Fell in the twater
  223. Pyrrho: Scepticemia
  224. Pythagoras: Squared on the hypotenuse
  225. Quine: Semantic ascent
  226. Rand, Ayn: Objectified ego
  227. Ramsey: Made redundant
  228. Rawls: Unveiled
  229. Redhead: Robust causes
  230. Reichenbach: Common causes
  231. Rescher: Incoherence
  232. Rorty: No foundations
  233. Rousseau: Contract job
  234. Russell: Vicious circle
  235. Ryle: Gave up the ghost
  236. Salmon: Fishy causal process
  237. Sartre: Nothing doing
  238. Saussure: Parole revoked
  239. Scheler: Became objectively valued
  240. Schlesinger: Became hypertensed
  241. Schlick: Collapsed protocol
  242. Schopenhauer: Involuntary causes
  243. Searle: Chinese torture
  244. Sellars: Slipped on slope
  245. Sheffer: Stroke
  246. Shoemaker: Loss of identity
  247. Simons: Departed
  248. Singer: Liberated
  249. Skinner, B F: Bad behaviour
  250. Slote: Had enough
  251. Smart: Dematerialised
  252. Smiley: Multiple conclusions
  253. Smith, A: Invisible hand
  254. Smith, P: Unanalysed
  255. Socrates: Consumption
  256. Sorabji: Four causes
  257. Sperber: Became irrelevant
  258. Spinoza: Substance abuse
  259. Stalnaker: Inquiry pending
  260. Strawson: Unidentified
  261. Sylvan: Lost in jungle
  262. Tanner: G?terdammerung
  263. Tarski: 'Death'
  264. Taylor: Renounced agency
  265. Thales: Liquidated [or also, drowning]
  266. Tuomela: Group decision
  267. Turing: Solved the halting problem
  268. Unger: Never knew
  269. Van Fraassen: Empirical inadequacy
  270. Von Wright: By obligation
  271. Walton: Make-believe
  272. Warburton: Went back to basics
  273. Weber: Overwork
  274. Wheeler: Manifold causes
  275. Whitehead: Procession
  276. Wiggins: Substantial change
  277. Williams: Bored with immortality
  278. Winch: Witchcraft
  279. Wisdom: Other minds
  280. Wittgenstein: Became the late Wittgenstein
  281. Wolf: Sanctified
  282. Wright: Minimal causes
  283. Zeno: Immobility


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