Ludwig Feuerbach 1804 – 1872

Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach was a German anthropological philosopher and one of the most influential of the Young Hegelians. After training under Hegel at Berlin and a brief university career cut short by the publication of his early Thoughts on Death and Immortality, he spent most of his life as a private scholar in rural Bavaria. His Essence of Christianity argued that theology is anthropology, that the predicates traditionally ascribed to God are in truth the alienated essence of humanity, and that the recovery of the human is the proper task of modern thought. Marx's Theses on Feuerbach took him as a starting point for the critique of philosophy as such.

Ludwig Andreas von Feuerbach was born at Landshut in Bavaria in July 1804, the fourth son of the criminal-law reformer Paul Johann Anselm Feuerbach. He studied theology at Heidelberg under Karl Daub, then philosophy at Berlin under Hegel from 1824, and took his doctorate at Erlangen in 1828 with a dissertation on the unity of reason. The anonymous publication of Thoughts on Death and Immortality in 1830 destroyed his academic prospects; from 1837 he lived in retirement at Bruckberg with his wife, whose porcelain factory supported him until its bankruptcy in 1860.

His major works are the History of Modern Philosophy from Bacon to Spinoza (1833), Pierre Bayle (1838), Towards a Critique of Hegelian Philosophy (1839), The Essence of Christianity (1841), Provisional Theses for the Reformation of Philosophy (1843), Principles of the Philosophy of the Future (1843), The Essence of Religion (1846), and Theogony (1857). After 1848, in which he played only a marginal role, he turned increasingly to a sensualist and even quasi-materialist anthropology.

Feuerbach argued that theology is anthropology in disguise: the predicates ascribed to God are projections of the alienated essence of humanity, which philosophy must reclaim from heaven for the species itself. His genetic critique of religion decisively shaped the Young Hegelians, the early Marx of the Theses on Feuerbach (1845), Engels, and the entire nineteenth-century critique of religion. He died at Rechenberg, near Nuremberg, in September 1872.