Eugen Dühring

Eugen Dühring (1833 to 1921) was a German philosopher, economist and socialist, born in Berlin in the Kingdom of Prussia. Though he became blind in early adulthood, he was a prolific and popular lecturer at the University of Berlin, where he began as a Privatdozent in 1864. His philosophy of the actual was a comprehensive materialist system that challenged German idealism, classical economics and organized religion, drawing on the positivism of Auguste Comte, the individualism of Arthur Schopenhauer and Ludwig Feuerbach's materialist critique of religion, while rejecting Schopenhauer's pessimism and metaphysics of the will. His ideas won influence in the German Social Democratic movement, which prompted Friedrich Engels to write Anti-Dühring. His academic career ended in 1877 with a controversial dismissal, and his later writings took a sharply antisemitic turn.