Richard Avenarius

Richard Heinrich Ludwig Avenarius (1843–1896) was a positivist philosopher of German birth who spent most of his career in Switzerland. Together with Ernst Mach, he is remembered as a founder of empiriocriticism, a doctrine that aimed to build philosophy on rigorous science while leaving metaphysics aside.

Born in Paris into a family of publishers, he was the son of Eduard Avenarius and Cecilia Wagner, a younger sister of Richard Wagner, who acted as his godfather. He studied in Zurich, Berlin and Leipzig, where he earned his doctorate in 1868 with a thesis on Spinoza's pantheism and qualified as a lecturer in 1876. That same year he helped found the Leipzig Philosophical Circle. In 1877 he moved to the University of Zurich, where he taught philosophy and inductive physics until his death. From that year he also co-edited the journal Vierteljahrsschrift für Wissenschaftliche Philosophie.

His central aim was a "human concept of the world" grounded in pure experience, in which humans and the world are not two separate realities but belong to a single experience. A consequence is that the distinction between physical and mental loses its force, since object and thought become different forms of the same elements. He rejected the materialism of Karl Vogt, which he called introjection, and proposed a relation of dependence between subject and object. His main work, Kritik der reinen Erfahrung, is notoriously difficult.

His writings found an enthusiastic readership among Russian intellectuals and students before the October Revolution. Lenin attacked them in Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1908). His ideas reached psychologists such as Oswald Külpe and thinkers such as Ernst Mach and Wilhelm Wundt, and he is also remembered as the model for a character in Milan Kundera's novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being.