Avenarius, Richard (1843–96)

The German philosopher Richard Avenarius was the founder of ‘empiriocriticism’, a school that aimed at establishing a scientific and purely empirical philosophy. Avenarius’ idea of an energy-saving principle regulating knowledge, and his refusal of the distinction between a psychical inner world and a physical outer world were shared by Ernst Mach, thus the term empiriocriticism was later used to indicate them both. Avenarius elaborated a theory of knowledge based on the advances of physiological and experimental psychology. He was a key figure in the nineteenth-century German debate about the relationship between philosophy and psychology. Even though Avenarius had a great influence on thinkers such as Husserl, Schlick, William James, and others, due to the difficulty of his writings his philosophy is now poorly studied and little known.