DUHRING, Karl Eugen. - Philosopher, b. in Berlin in 1833, d. in Nowawes in 1921. From 1863 to 1877 he was a *Privatdozent* in Berlin. A positivist who began from empiricism, he ended in dogmatic materialism: universal original matter progresses through an intrinsic law up to the supreme form of consciousness. Human social autonomy is the supreme ideal. He spent his life spreading and defending his optimistic evolutionism. Engels, starting from his rigidly Marxist positions, polemicized against those aspects of Dühring’s evolutionism that appeared to him bourgeois and optimistic (*Herrn Eugen Dühring Umwälzung der Wissenschaft*, 1878).
Principal works: *Natürliche Dialektik* (Berlin 1865); *Der Wert des Lebens* (Breslau 1865, 8th ed. 1922); *Kurs der National-und Sozialökonomie* (Berlin 1873, 3rd ed. 1892); *Der Ersatz der Religion durch Vollkommenes* (Karlsruhe 1883, 2nd ed. 1906).