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.