Notes on Introduction to Philosophy -- Phil A201

William Jamison - Instructor

Lecture 13

Thirteenth lecture notes for Introduction to Philosophy:

Slide 1:

Ludwig Feuerbach 1804 - 1872

The object of religious devotion is really the capacities which make up human nature.

Those capacities were attributed to a Being who was completely 'other,' outside of the world.

In comparison humanity seemed contemptible. Humanity was repressed for the sake of sacrificial service to God.

Slide 2:

Young Hegelians

Stirner:

Feuerbach's assertion that the predicates of God and humanity are really the same is simply and obviously wrong.

To say that it is the subject, God, that is exaggerated and not the predicates, so that the predicates are still applicable to humanity, is nonsense because the subject only has a nature through the predicates applied to it.

Slide 3:

Feuerbach's influence on Marx

When an ideal has psychological power over a person, it becomes something Holy. Feuerbachian humanism was a new religion.

Marx made this religion Communism

but he says: "If I know religion as alienated human self-consciousness what I know in it as religion is not my self-consciousness but my alienated self-consciousness confirmed in it."

Slide 4:

Karl Marx 1818 - 1883

Primarily social and economic influence

Naturalized Hegelianism - man as a "species being."

Dialectical Materialism

Concept of alienation

self-consciousness (religion)

objective being (production)

labor (capitalism)

life

Next lecture