Ludwig Büchner

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.