There followed the materialist and atheist Jean Meslier, Julien Offroy de La Mettrie, Paul-Henri Thiry Baron d ' Holbach, Denis Diderot, and other French Enlightenment thinkers ; as well as in England, John " Walking " Stewart, whose insistence that all matter is endowed with a moral dimension had a major impact on the philosophical poetry of William Wordsworth.

An associate of Left Hegelian circles, Feuerbach was politically liberal, an atheist and a materialist.

Quetelet was a liberal and an anticlerical, but not an atheist or materialist nor a socialist.

Chaumette was an ardent critic of Christianity, which he believed to consist of " ridiculous ideas " that " have been very helpful to despotism .” In his ultra-radical views, he was heavily influenced by atheist and materialist writers Paul d ' Holbach, Denis Diderot and Jean Meslier.

Within the definition of bright, many, but not all, brights also identify variously under other terms or identities, including atheist, humanist, secular humanist, freethinker, objectivist, rationalist, naturalist, materialist, agnostic, skeptic, apatheist, or even naturalistic pantheists or classical Deists, and so on.

As a young man, Schumacher was a dedicated atheist, but his later rejection of materialist, capitalist, agnostic modernity was paralleled by a growing fascination with religion.

This capitalizes on the social shift in starting assumptions from the situation that most are regarded as materialist / atheist ( the modern position ), to the fact that many people now believe in and are searching for something more spiritual ( postmodern view ).

An anti-religious network was created within the party with the stated goal of turning the party into a solely atheist party with a materialist – Marxist basis.

He was widely and probably correctly regarded as a materialist or atheist: there was no place for the supernatural in his account of biology.

Combe's most popular work, The Constitution of Man, was published in 1828, and he was widely denounced as a materialist and atheist.

In 1818, he published O Retrato de Vénus, a work for which was soon to be prosecuted, as it was considered " materialist, atheist, and immoral "; it was during this period that he adopted and added his pen name de Almeida Garrett, who was seen as more aristocratic.

Friedrich Engels co-developed with Karl Marx a materialist analysis of history, since known as historical materialism, beginning with their joint critique of the Young Hegelians and Feuerbach in the two books The Holy Family ( 1845 ) and The German Ideology ( 1852 ).

Also, in his Theses on Feuerbach ( 1845 ), in which the young Marx broke with Feuerbach's idealism, he writes that " the philosophers have only described the world, in various ways, the point is to change it ," and his materialist approach allows for and empowers such change.

Jakubowski rehearses for the reader the steps Marx and Engels took away from Hegel, via Feuerbach, to their ' historical materialist ' position.

A materialist would see a narrative that relates supernatural, fantastic things like angels, demons etc.

From the contents of a letter to the congregation which he left, it would appear that, while a firm believer in the proper divinity of Christ, he had at this time disowned the cardinal principles of Calvinism ; and that he was so far a materialist as to " hold that man's thinking powers and faculties are the result of a certain organization of matter, and that after death he ceases to be conscious till the resurrection ".

The Historical School were themselves reacting against materialist determinism, the idea that human action could, and would ( once science advanced enough ), be explained as physical and chemical reactions.

This leads to results which would in a loose and popular sense be called materialist.

Based on a dialectical materialist account of history, Marxism posited that capitalism, like previous socioeconomic systems, would inevitably produce internal tensions leading to its own destruction.

Plekhanov always insisted that Marxism was a materialist doctrine rather than an idealist one, and that Russia would have to pass through a capitalist stage of development before becoming socialist.

He would later remark that his continued studies in theology drew him closer to atheism: " I had a very clear feeling that I didn't believe in God and that I had in fact received a certificate in materialist uncertainty ; the more I studied religious subjects, the less I believed in God.

Blavatsky attempted to demonstrate that the discoveries of " materialist " science had been anticipated in the writings of ancient sages, and that materialism would be proven wrong.

It was one of Marx's first attempts to deal with categories that would later be called the materialist conception of history.

According to Benjamin, these drafts were astonishing for “ the precision of their materialist deciphering ,” as well as the way in which “ musical facts … had been made socially transparent in a way that was completely new to me .” In his Wagner study, the thesis later to characterize Dialectic of Enlightenment — man's domination of nature — first emerges.

The navy's part in securing victory was not fully understood by French public opinion in 1918, but a synthesis of old and new ideas arose from the lessons of the war, especially by admiral Raoul Castex ( 1878 – 1968 ), from 1927 to 1935, who synthesized in his five-volume Théories Stratégiques the classical and materialist schools of naval theory.

Through early 1980s Thames experienced a series of local disputes while management deliberately confronted contractual ‘ rackets ’ and pursued the introduction of new technologies based on operational requirements rather than precedent For Thames ’ s management, this was a materialist operations with a clear dimension, to wedded out unscrupulous bargaining and working practices.

" Marx's theory follows a materialist law of history and space, where the development of the productive forces is seen as the primary motive force for historical change, and according to which the social and material contradictions inherent to capitalism will inevitably lead to its negation, thereby replacing capitalism with a new rational form of society: communism.

Contemporary phenomena such as hikikomori and parasite singles are seen as examples of late Japanese culture's growing problem of the new generation growing up unable to deal with the complexities of honne – tatemae and pressure of an increasingly materialist society.

After extensive survey research, Inglehart postulated that the Western societies under the scope of his survey were undergoing transformation of individual values, switching from materialist values, emphasizing economic and physical security, to a new set of post-materialist values, which instead emphasized autonomy and self-expression.

It was successful in that it promoted a theory of regarding thought, that garnered enough attention, to prove a competition to the new waves of positivism, and therefore materialist conceptions of social life that were vying for reformist tendencies in the politics of the time.

Gould wrote that Eimer was a materialist who rejected any vitalist or teleological approach to orthogenesis and explained that Eimer's criticism of natural selection was common amongst many evolutionists of his generation as they were searching for alternative evolutionary mechanisms as it was believed at the time that natural selection could not create new species.

Richard H. Popkin ( 1990 ) applies the term to the " spiritual physics " of Cambridge Platonist Henry More and his pupil and collaborator Lady Anne Conway, who enthusiatically accepted the new science, but rejected the various forms of materialist mechanism proposed by Descartes, Hobbes and Spinoza to buttress it, as these, More and Conway argued, were incapable of explaining productive causality.

In 2005, Alan Sykes argued that National-Anarchism represents a further evolution in the thinking of the radical right rather than an entirely new dimension, a response to the new situation of the late 20th century in which the apparent triumph of materialist capitalism on a global scale requires a greater assertion of the centrality of anti-materialist nationalism.

Leontyev had seen human action as a result of biological as well as cultural evolution and, drawing on Marx's materialist conception of culture, stressed that individual cognition always is part of social action which in turn is mediated by man-made tools ( cultural artifacts ), language and other man-made systems of symbols, which he viewed as a major distinguishing feature of human culture and, thus, human cognition.

He did not develop a comprehensive system of materialism, but he may have made some contributions to the atheistic materialist works of his friend Paul Henri Thiry, baron d ' Holbach.

Marx himself had talked about the " materialist conception of history ", which was later referred to as " historical materialism " by Engels.

Engels further exposed the " materialist dialectic " — not " dialectical materialism " — in his Dialectics of Nature in 1883.

In Materialism and Empiriocriticism ( 1908 ), Lenin explained dialectical materialism as three axes: ( i ) the materialist inversion of Hegelian dialectics, ( ii ) the historicity of ethical principles ordered to class struggle, and ( iii ) the convergence of " laws of evolution " in physics ( Helmholtz ), biology ( Darwin ), and in political economy ( Marx ).

Historical materialism is a methodological approach to the study of society, economics, and history, first articulated by Karl Marx ( 1818 – 1883 ) as " the materialist conception of history ".

During the 19th century, Karl Marx extended the concept of materialism to elaborate a materialist conception of history centered on the roughly empirical world of human activity ( practice, including labor ) and the institutions created, reproduced, or destroyed by that activity ( see materialist conception of history ).

Marxian socialism is philosophically materialist as well as having at its centre a commitment to historical materialism.

Marxist dialectics is exemplified in Das Kapital ( Capital ), which outlines two central theories: ( i ) surplus value and ( ii ) the materialist conception of history ; Marx explains dialectical materialism:

Developed by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels in the mid-to-late-19th Century, Marxism is a sociopolitical and economic view based on the philosophy of dialectical materialism, which opposes idealism in favour of the materialist viewpoint.

During his life Plekhanov wrote extensively on historical materialism, on the history of materialist philosophy, on the role of the masses and of the individual in history.

Eliminative materialism ( also called eliminativism ) is a materialist position in the philosophy of mind.

The other main group of materialist views in the philosophy of mind can be labeled non-emergent ( or non-emergentist ) materialism, and includes identity theory ( reductive materialism ), philosophical behaviorism, functionalism, and eliminativism ( eliminative materialism ).

Anarchists were among the first to criticise the dialectical materialist trend as pseudo-science and generally criticised either the Marxist methodologies as such, or the applications of them, on the basis that both historical and dialectical materialism dehumanise people as the agents of history.

A second referent is the materialist conception of history held by many socialists, most notably Marx and Engels, as well as their philosophic concept of dialectical materialism.

This comprises what Marx termed the materialist conception of history ( see also: materialism ), and is in contrast to an idealist analysis, which states that the fundamental driving force behind socioeconomic change are the ideas of enlightened individuals.

New Historicism shares many of the same theories as with what is often called cultural materialism, but cultural materialist critics are even more likely to put emphasis on the present implications of their study and to position themselves in disagreement to current power structures, working to give power to traditionally disadvantaged groups.

Additionally, Volkmann was an evangelical who opposed materialism and gave a number of speeches against the materialist assumption of identity between the body and mind.

The strategy was put forth in a Discovery Institute manifesto known as the Wedge Document, which describes a broad social, political, and academic agenda whose ultimate goal is to defeat materialism, naturalism, evolution, and " reverse the stifling materialist world view and replace it with a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.

In addition, the intelligent design movement seeks as a well-documented agenda the overall goal " to defeat materialism " and the " materialist world view " as represented by evolution, and replace it with " a science consonant with Christian and theistic convictions.