Feuerbach

Feuerbach's thought was a major influence on his contemporaries, particularly Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx adopted Feuerbach's materialist inversion of Hegel and his theory of alienation, but later criticized him in his Theses on Feuerbach for having a materialism that was too contemplative and for understanding humanity in terms of a static "essence" rather than in terms of concrete social and historical practice (praxis). Feuerbach's work also exerted an influence on the thought of Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud.