Richard Avenarius

Richard Avenarius (1843 to 1896) was a German-Swiss philosopher who founded the radical positivist doctrine of empirio-criticism, or empirical criticism. Born Richard Habermann, he studied at Zurich, Berlin and Leipzig, took his doctorate at Leipzig in 1868 with a thesis on Spinoza and his pantheism, and became a professor at the University of Zurich in 1877. He held that scientific philosophy must give purely descriptive definitions of experience, free of both metaphysics and materialism. His principal works, the famously difficult Critique of Pure Experience (1888 to 1890) and The Human Concept of the World (1891), influenced Ernst Mach, Ber Borochov and, to a lesser extent, William James. His standpoint drew a sustained attack from Vladimir Lenin in Materialism and Empirio-criticism. His mother was a sister or step-sister of Richard Wagner, who stood as his godfather.