Avenarius Richard (1843–96), German philosopher. He was born in Paris and educated at the University of Leipzig. He became a professor at Leipzig and succeeded Windelband at the University of Zürich in 1877. For a time he was editor of the Zeitschrift für wissenschaftliche Philosophie. His earliest work was Über die beiden ersten Phasen des Spinozischen Pantheismus (1868). His major work, Kritik der reinen Erfahrung (Critique of Pure Experience, 2 vols., 1888–90), was followed by his last study, Der menschliche Weltbegriffe (1891). In his post-Kantian Kritik Avenarius presented a radical positivism that sought to base philosophy on scientific principles. This ’empirio-criticism’ emphasized ‘pure experience’ and descriptive and general definitions of experience. Metaphysical claims to transcend experience were rejected as mere creations of the mind. Like Hume, Avenarius denied the ontological validity of substance and causality. Seeking a scientific empiricism, he endeavored to delineate a descriptive determination of the form and content of pure experience. He thought that the subject–object dichotomy, the separation of inner and outer experiences, falsified reality. If we could avoid ‘introjecting’ feeling, thought, and will into experience (and thereby splitting it into subject and object), we could attain the original ‘natural’ view of the world.
Although Avenarius, in his Critique of Pure Experience, thought that changes in brain states parallel states of consciousness, he did not reduce sensations or states of consciousness to physiological changes in the brain. Because his theory of pure experience undermined dogmatic materialism, Lenin attacked his philosophy in Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1952). His epistemology influenced Mach and his emphasis upon pure experience had considerable influence on James.
See also SUBJECT –OBJECT DICHOTOM. G.J.S.