Eugen Dühring

Eugen Karl Dühring (12 January 1833, Berlin – 21 September 1921, Nowawes in modern-day Potsdam-Babelsberg) was a German positivist philosopher and economist, a socialist who was a strong critic of Marxism.

Dühring was born in Berlin, Prussia. After a legal education he practised at Berlin as a lawyer until 1859. A weakness of the eyes, ending in total blindness, occasioned his taking up the studies with which his name is now connected. In 1864 he became docent of the University of Berlin, but, in consequence of a quarrel with the professoriate, was deprived of his licence to teach in 1874.

Among his works are Kapital und Arbeit (1865); Der Wert des Lebens (1865); Natürliche Dialektik (1865); Kritische Geschichte der Philosophie (von ihren Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart) (1869); Kritische Geschichte der allgemeinen Principien der Mechanik (1872), one of his most successful works; Kursus der National und Sozialokonomie (1873); Kursus der Philosophie (1875), entitled in a later edition Wirklichkeitsphilosophie; Logik und Wissenschaftstheorie (1878); and Der Ersatz der Religion durch Vollkommeneres (1883). He also published Die Judenfrage als Frage der Racenschaedlichkeit (1881, The Parties and the Jewish Question), and other antisemitic treatises.

He published his autobiography in 1882 under the title Sache, Leben und Feinde; the mention of Feinde (enemies) is characteristic. Dühring's philosophy claims to be emphatically the philosophy of reality. He is passionate in his denunciation of everything which, like mysticism, tries to veil reality. He is, in the words of historian Carlton J. H. Hayes "almost Lucretian in his anger against religion" which would withdraw the secret of the universe from our direct gaze. His substitute for religion is a doctrine in many points akin to Comte and Feuerbach, the former of whom he resembles in his sentimentalism.

...
Wikipedia