Five deaths in August: a heavy month for philosophy

It has been a heavy month for the philosophical community. Five academics died in August 2026.

Taken as a whole, the list amounts to a cross-section of the different veins of philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century.

Anthony Kenny (1931-2026)#

He died on 3 August at the age of ninety-five.

Born in Liverpool, he trained first as a Catholic priest; philosophical doubts led him to leave the priesthood in 1963. He then became one of the central figures of English philosophy.

He was a fellow in philosophy at Balliol College from 1964 to 1978 and Master of the college from 1978 to 1989. During his time as Warden of Rhodes House he held a professorship at St John's College. He served as Pro-Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford, as chairman of the board of the British Library and as President of the British Academy.

He was an authority on Aristotle and Aquinas, but he wrote on Descartes, Frege and Wittgenstein as well. The four-volume Oxford History of Western Philosophy is the product of that range. Wittgenstein (1973) and A New History of Western Philosophy are among his most widely read books.

Kenny's particular distinction lay in getting analytic philosophy and the scholastic tradition to talk to one another. Reading Aquinas with Wittgenstein's tools was not a usual thing to do at the time.

Cain Todd (1976-2026)#

He died on 11 August at the age of fifty. He taught philosophy at Lancaster University.

He worked in aesthetics and the philosophy of emotion. That he was the youngest of the five goes some way to explaining the effect the news had on the community.

David Charles (1947-2026)#

He died on 14 August. He was professor emeritus of philosophy at Yale University.

He was among the leading contemporary scholars of Aristotle. Work such as Aristotle on Meaning and Essence established a reading that set Aristotle's essentialism alongside current debates in the philosophy of language.

Charles's death, together with Kenny's, meant the loss of two major interpreters of Aristotle within a single month.

Tom Rockmore (1942-2026)#

He died on 21 August. He was professor emeritus at Peking University and distinguished professor emeritus at Duquesne University.

He wrote on German idealism, and on Hegel, Marx and Heidegger. His decision to settle in China late in his career and to teach there helped to establish continental philosophy in the Chinese academy.

Books of Rockmore's such as Before and After Hegel and Heidegger and French Philosophy were read as intermediary texts, connecting the Anglo-American reader to the continental tradition.

Gabriele Taylor (1927-2026)#

She died on 26 August. She was an honorary fellow in philosophy at St Anne's College, Oxford.

She worked in moral psychology. Her books Pride, Shame and Guilt (1985) and Deadly Vices (2006) made the moral emotions and the moral failings a subject of philosophical analysis.

Taylor's work belonged to the period in which moral philosophy opened out from the argument about principles and rules to the argument about feeling and character. That line developed in the same years as Bernard Williams's critique of system, which we have covered before; both were at Oxford.

A note#

That these deaths came one after another is chance. But looking down the list, one sees a generation leaving the stage: Kenny was born in 1931, Taylor in 1927; both were formed in the years when post-war British philosophy was being built.

At Philosophers News we plan to treat the work of these figures in separate pieces in the period ahead.