Hermann Lotze

Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817 to 1881) was a German philosopher who mediated the transition from the exuberance of German idealism in the first half of the nineteenth century to the sober, scholarly and scientific ethos that prevailed in the second half. Born at Bautzen in Saxony, he took degrees in both medicine and philosophy at Leipzig in 1838, became the successor to Herbart at Gottingen, and died in Berlin in 1881. He adapted the idea of chief or defining problems in the philosophical sub-disciplines, inherited from Herbart, and set opposing approaches against one another on each, preparing the way for the modern textbook. He hoped to keep a special place for philosophy as a value-theoretic investigation, and his work bears on the controversies over polygenesism, panpsychism and vitalism and on the later traditions of monism, personalism and value theory.