Hermann Lotze
Hermann Lotze (1817–1881) was a German philosopher and physician who sought to reconcile scientific accounts of nature with mind, value, and purpose.
Metaphysics: The philosophical study of reality, including what exists and how its fundamental features relate. Lotze treated metaphysical questions as necessary for connecting scientific findings into a coherent account of reality.
Monads: In Leibniz’s philosophy, simple, nonmaterial substances that express the universe from their own perspectives. Lotze recast monads as living centers whose relations help explain a unified world.
Rudolf Hermann Lotze: A German philosopher and physician born in 1817, known for work in metaphysics, psychology, and value theory. This variant ordering of his names appears in some references; it identifies the same thinker.
Neo-Kantianism: A late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century movement that revived Kantian philosophy and examined the conditions of knowledge and value. Lotze helped prepare the return to Kant by showing how science left philosophical questions unresolved.
Microcosmus: Hermann Lotze’s three-volume philosophical work, published in German from 1856 to 1864, on humanity’s place in the world. This work presents his attempt to connect natural science, human experience, and moral purpose.
Psychology: The systematic study of mental processes and behavior. His early work in psychology informed his account of perception, feeling, and mental life.
Psychophysical parallelism: The view that mental and physical events correspond without directly causing one another. Lotze considered mind and body coordinated, but resisted treating their connection as mere parallel correspondence.
Immanuel Kant: An eighteenth-century German philosopher whose critical philosophy examined the limits and conditions of human knowledge. Lotze inherited Kantian questions about knowledge while developing a different account of metaphysics and value.
Baden School: A branch of neo-Kantianism centered on values, cultural sciences, and the distinction between facts and norms. Its philosophers developed themes of value that Lotze had made central to modern German philosophy.
Logic (Lotze): Hermann Lotze’s systematic treatment of logic, published in 1874 as part of his philosophical system. It shows how he connected logical laws with the conditions of thought and objective knowledge.