Ludwig Feuerbach

Independent activity 1804–1872 ○ Pneumonia

Materialist philosopher whose Essence of Christianity read God as a projection of human nature, the bridge between Hegel and Marx

Born in 1804 at Landshut in Bavaria, the son of a jurist, he studied under Hegel in Berlin from 1825. He taught Hegel's philosophy as a Privatdozent at Erlangen, but the scandal of his anonymous Thoughts on Death and Immortality (1830) closed the academic road, and from 1837 he lived as a free writer at Bruckberg. In 1839 he broke openly with Hegelian idealism, and in The Essence of Christianity (1841) he argued that religion is a self-alienation in which humanity projects its own species-essence onto a god it then worships. As theoretical leader of the Young Hegelians he deeply shaped Marx and Engels, but in the Theses on Feuerbach (1845) Marx faulted his materialism as contemplative and blind to practice. He joined the Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1869 and died near Nuremberg in 1872.

Also known as: Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach