Richard Avenarius

Richard Avenarius
Born	November 19, 1843, Paris
Died	August 18, 1896 Zurich
Era	19th-century philosophy
Region	Western philosophy
School	Empirio-criticism (Critical positivism)[1]
Main interests	Empirical knowledge, philosophy of science
Notable ideas	empirical criticism
Influences Kant, Hume
Influenced Ernst Mach, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Alexander Bogdanov, William James

Richard Ludwig Heinrich Avenarius (Paris, November 19, 1843 – Zürich, August 18, 1896) was a German-Swiss philosopher. He formulated the radical positivist doctrine of "empirical criticism" or empirio-criticism.

Avenarius attended the Nicolaischule in Leipzig and studied in Zurich, Berlin, and Leipzig. At the University of Leipzig, he received the Doctor of Philosophy in 1868 with his thesis on Baruch Spinoza and his pantheism, obtained the habilitation in 1876 and taught as Privatdozent. One year later, he became professor at the University of Zurich. He died in Zurich in 1896.

Works

Avenarius believed that scientific philosophy must be concerned with purely descriptive definitions of experience, which must be free of both metaphysics and materialism. His opposition to the materialist assertions of Karl Vogt resulted in an attack upon empirio-criticism by Vladimir Lenin in the latter's Materialism and Empirio-criticism.

Avenarius' principal works are the famously difficult Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (Critique of Pure Experience, 1888–1890) and Der menschliche Weltbegriff (The Human Concept of the World, 1891) which influenced Ernst Mach, Ber Borochov and, to a lesser extent, William James.^[2]

He taught Anatoly Lunacharsky and was also influential on Alexander Bogdanov.

Family

Avenarius was the second son of the German publisher Eduard Avenarius and Cäcilie née Geyer, a daughter of the actor and painter Dürerbund and belonged to the initiators of a culture reform movement in Germany. Wagner was Avenarius' godfather.

Notes

^ See John Deathridge, "Introduction" p. XXXIII in Richard Wagner. The Family Letters of Richard Wagner, University of Michigan Press, 1991. ISBN 0-472-10292-3

References

External links

• Works by or about Richard Avenarius at Internet Archive
• Literature by and about Richard Avenarius in the German National Library catalogue
• Friedrich Carstanjen, Richard Avenarius and His General Theory of Knowledge, Empiriocriticism (1906)