Ludwig Feuerbach
German philosopher and anthropologist (1804–1872)
Ludwig Andreas Feuerbach ( FOIR-bahkh; German: [ˈluːtvɪç ˈfɔʏɐbax]; 28 July 1804 – 13 September 1872) was a German philosopher and anthropologist who was a leading figure among the Young Hegelians. He is best known for his 1841 book, The Essence of Christianity, which argued that God is a projection of the essential attributes of humanity. His critique of religion formed the basis for his advocacy of atheism, materialism, and sensualism. His thought served as a critical bridge between the philosophy of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel and that of Karl Marx.
The son of a distinguished jurist, Feuerbach studied theology at Heidelberg before moving to Berlin to study directly under Hegel. His academic career was cut short in 1830 when his anonymously published first book, Thoughts on Death and Immortality, was condemned as scandalous for its attack on the concept of personal immortality. Barred from university posts, Feuerbach lived and worked in rural isolation for much of his life, in which he produced most of his significant writings supported by his wife's share in a porcelain factory.
Feuerbach's philosophy developed as a critique of Hegel's speculative idealism, which he viewed as the last, most abstract form of theology. He argued that idealism inverted the true relationship between thought and being, and that philosophy's proper subject was not the abstract Absolute, but the concrete, sensuous human being. In The Essence of Christianity, he contended that religion is a form of self-alienation in which humanity projects its own "species-essence"—its unlimited capacity for reason, love, and will—onto a divine being, which it then worships.
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This entry incorporates text from “Ludwig Feuerbach” on English Wikipedia. Contributors are listed in the page history. Text is available under the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License. Selected authority identifiers and statements are retrieved from Wikidata under CC0; their references and qualifiers remain part of the verification path.