Hermann Lotze

Rudolf Hermann Lotze (1817 to 1881) was a German philosopher and logician who also held a medical degree and worked in physiology and early scientific psychology. Born in Bautzen in Saxony, he studied medicine and philosophy at Leipzig, taught there, and then succeeded Johann Friedrich Herbart in the chair of philosophy at Gottingen. His Medical Psychology of 1852 and his earlier medical writings applied mechanical explanation to the body while treating mind as an immaterial principle. He argued that if the physical world is governed by mechanical laws, developments in the universe could be understood as the working of a world mind, a view that opened the way for later personalism and value theory. He rejected Hegelian formalism without joining the materialists, and he denied that he belonged to the school of Herbart, though he accepted Leibniz as a forerunner. He is included here as a nineteenth century thinker whose account of mind, mechanism and value shaped later social and psychological thought.