Ludwig Feuerbach

Feuerbach was the son of the famous Bavarian jurist Anselm Feuerbach; his brothers included a mathematician and an archaeologist. He began theology at Heidelberg, moved to Berlin in 1824 to hear Hegel, and turned from theology to philosophy, saying he had found in Hegel 'what I had sought in vain in theology'. After his doctorate in 1828 he lectured at Erlangen.

In 1830 he anonymously published Thoughts on Death and Immortality, denying the immortality of the individual soul; his authorship was soon known and his academic career was over. He lived thereafter on his wife's share in a porcelain factory, secluded in the village of Bruckberg, writing for forty years as an independent scholar apart from both university and politics. During the revolution of 1848 students at Heidelberg invited him to lecture and he delivered The Essence of Religion, but he took no part in politics.

The Essence of Christianity appeared in 1841 and shook the Young Hegelians; Engels said 'we all became Feuerbachians at once'. Its argument: every attribute of God, reason, love, will, infinity, is a human attribute; humanity objectifies its own species-essence as an independent being and then kneels before it. Theology is inverted anthropology and religion is human self-alienation. To recover the human essence one must recognise that 'man is God to man'.

He went on to argue that Hegel's speculative philosophy was theology's last refuge and that philosophy must begin from the sensuous, embodied, needy concrete human being: 'I feel' should replace 'I think'. Late in life he read Marx and joined the Social Democratic party; workers followed his coffin. Marx's Theses on Feuerbach reply that he had only interpreted the world when the point is to change it, and that his 'man' is an abstraction, the real human being the ensemble of social relations; but the materialist turn began with him.