Hermann Lotze 1817 – 1881

Rudolf Hermann Lotze was a German philosopher and physician whose work bridged the late idealist and the natural-scientific cultures of nineteenth-century Germany. Trained in both medicine and philosophy at Leipzig, he succeeded Herbart at Gottingen and dominated German philosophy from the chair there for thirty years. His three-volume Microcosmus offered a vast philosophical anthropology in which mechanism is universal in extent but subordinate in significance to a world of values, while his Logic and Metaphysics shaped the next generation through students including Bradley, Royce, James, and the founders of the neo-Kantian movement.