Friedrich Albert Lange

Friedrich Albert Lange (Wald, 1828 – Marburg, 1875) was a German philosopher and sociologist, a figure of neo-Kantianism and author of the influential History of Materialism. He is also remembered for his political activism, but his thought deserves attention for its attempt to reconcile Kant's epistemology with the sciences of his time.

The son of the theologian Johann Peter Lange, he studied at Duisburg, Zurich and Bonn. He worked as a schoolmaster and lecturer in Cologne, Bonn and Duisburg, until he left teaching when the government forbade teachers to take part in political agitation. He then turned to militant journalism in favour of social reform, and wrote books such as The Labour Question (1865) alongside his History of Materialism (1866).

In 1866 he settled in Winterthur, near Zurich, to work with a democratic newspaper. He became a professor at Zurich in 1870, but soon resigned after the Franco-Prussian War and withdrew from politics. In 1872 he took up a chair at Marburg, where he died in 1875 after a long illness.

Starting from Kant, he held that we know only phenomena, so no metaphysical system, materialism included, can claim ultimate truth. Materialism, with its exact scientific methods, serves empirical knowledge well, but metaphysics, religion and ethics have for him an expressive value, since they give form to human aspirations. His psychological reading of the a priori was later criticised by the Marburg School.

His influence reached German reformist socialism and, posthumously, Eduard Bernstein, who found in his ethically grounded Kantianism a basis for reform. Today he is remembered as a bridge between epistemology and the social question.