Feuerbach (1804-1872) was a famous materialist philosopher in German classical philosophy. His main works include "The Essence of Christianity" and "Principles of Future Philosophy". He opposed autocratic monarchy and advocated bourgeois democracy, representing the interests of the German bourgeois radical group at that time. On the eve of the German bourgeois revolution in 1848, he abandoned the extremely influential Hegel's idealist philosophy and restored the due authority of materialism, which had a major impact on young Marx and Engels. He made a profound criticism of religion, believing that God was nothing more than a reflection of human nature in fantasy. He criticized Kant's agnosticism, advocating that human beings 'cognitive ability is infinite; he criticized Hegel for reversing the relationship between matter and spirit, advocating that matter precedes spirit. He raised nature and man to the primary position and recognized the intelligibility, regularity and inevitability of nature. But the people he refers to are biological natural people, not social people, so his materialism is "humanistic materialism." When criticizing Hegel's philosophy, he lost the dialectics in it, failed to see people's subjective initiative in objective existence, did not understand the role of social practice in understanding, and also advocated universal religion of love and morality of love. When Marx and Engels founded dialectical materialism, they absorbed the "basic core" of materialism in Feuerbach's philosophy.

Comment: He played a very important role in the emergence and development of Marxism.