A number of philosophers throughout history were murdered, executed, or died as a direct result of political or religious persecution for their ideas or actions. 

Notable examples include:

• Socrates (d. 399 BCE): The classical Greek philosopher was tried and sentenced to death by an Athenian jury on charges of "corrupting the youth" and "impiety" (not believing in the state gods). He was forced to carry out his own execution by drinking a cup of poison hemlock.
• Hypatia of Alexandria (d. 415 CE): A Hellenistic Neoplatonist philosopher, astronomer, and mathematician, Hypatia was murdered by a Christian mob in Alexandria. She was dragged from her chariot, stripped naked, and her flesh was scraped off with sharp shells or broken roof tiles in a church.
• Boethius (d. c. 526 CE): A Roman senator, consul, historian, and philosopher, he was imprisoned and later strangled on the orders of the Ostrogoth king Theodoric the Great for alleged treason.
• Giordano Bruno (d. 1600 CE): An Italian Dominican friar and philosopher who proposed an infinite universe with countless stars and planets, he was tried for heresy by the Roman Inquisition for his theological and cosmological views. He refused to recant and was burned at the stake in Rome.
• Thomas More (d. 1535 CE): The English philosopher and statesman was beheaded after falling out of favor with King Henry VIII, primarily for refusing to accept the King as the head of the new Church of England.
• Peter Ramus (d. 1572 CE): A French humanist, philosopher, and educational reformer, he was killed in the St. Bartholomew's Day Massacre, a targeted series of assassinations and Catholic mob violence against Huguenots (French Calvinist Protestants).
• Lucilio Vanini (d. 1619 CE): An Italian philosopher, he was executed by strangulation and his body burned in Toulouse, France, on charges of atheism and blasphemy.
• Algernon Sidney (d. 1683 CE): An English philosopher and political theorist, he was executed for treason for his involvement in the Rye House Plot, a plan to assassinate King Charles II and his brother.
• Moritz Schlick (d. 1936 CE): The founder of the Vienna Circle, a group of logical positivists, Schlick was murdered by a student on the steps of the University of Vienna.
• Gustav Shpet and Pavel Florensky (d. 1937 CE): Russian philosophers who were executed during Stalin's Great Purge.
• Walter Benjamin (d. 1940 CE): A German-Jewish philosopher, he committed suicide at the Spanish border after being told he would be turned back to Nazi-occupied France.
• Leon Trotsky (d. 1940 CE): A Marxist theorist and revolutionary, he was assassinated in Mexico by a Soviet agent on orders from Joseph Stalin.
• Edith Stein (d. 1942 CE): A German Jewish philosopher who converted to Catholicism and became a nun, she died in a gas chamber at the Auschwitz concentration camp during the Holocaust.
• Georges Politzer, Jean Cavaillès, Albert Lautman, and Marc Bloch (d. 1942–1944 CE): French philosophers and academics who were active in the French Resistance and shot by the Gestapo.
• Giovanni Gentile (d. 1944 CE): An Italian idealist philosopher and a key figure in the development of Fascist ideology, he was murdered by communist partisans.
• Dietrich Bonhoeffer (d. 1945 CE): A German theologian and philosopher who was a founding member of the Confessing Church (a Protestant resistance movement), he was executed by hanging by the Nazis.
• Mahatma Gandhi (d. 1948 CE): The Indian political ethicist and philosopher of nonviolent resistance was shot and killed by a Hindu zealot.
• Malcolm X (d. 1965 CE) and Martin Luther King Jr. (d. 1968 CE): Both influential philosophers and activists in the American civil rights movement, they were assassinated for their work.
• Jan Patočka (d. 1977 CE): A Czechoslovakian philosopher and human rights activist (Charter 77 signatory), he died of a stroke after an 11-hour interrogation by the secret police.
• Narendra Dabholkar (d. 2013 CE): A rationalist and social activist campaigning against superstition in India, he was assassinated by religious extremists