Büchner, Ludwig

Büchner, Ludwig 

Born Sept. 29, 1824, in Darmstadt; died there May 1, 1899. German physician, natural scientist, and philosopher. Son of a physician and brother of the writer G. Büchner.

Büchner was a representative of vulgar materialism, in the spirit of which he denied dialectics and the social nature of man; Büchner shared the ideas of so-called social Darwinism. Although he asserted that consciousness (which he considered to be a mirror reflection of reality) was a product of matter, Büchner nevertheless criticized K. Vogt’s idea that the brain secretes thought just as the liver secretes bile (see Sila i materiia, St. Petersburg, 1907, p. 161). Büchner combined a faith in the unlimited possibilities of science and a critique of agnosticism with some reservations about the “unknowable” of the material world. Following F. Engels, with whose work Büchner was familiar, he considered motion an attribute of matter.

WORKS

In Russian translation:
Priroda i nauka, vol. 3, Kiev, 1881.
Psikhicheskaia zhizn’ zhivotnykh. St. Petersburg, 1902.

REFERENCES

Istoriia filosofii, vol. 3. Moscow, 1959. (Has a name index.)
Bakradze, K. Ocherki po istorii novoi i noveishei sovremennoi burzhuaznoi filosofii. Tbilisi, 1960. Chapter 1, pages 26-56.

A. P. OGURTSOV