The Philosophy of Rudolph Hermann Lotze (Routledge Studies in Nineteenth-Century Philosophy)

Rudolph Hermann Lotze (1817‒1881) was a leading figure of late 19th-century German philosophy. This volume provides a comprehensive reassessment of Lotze's thought and analyzes the many different aspects of his logic, metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind.

Lotze reconsidered the philosophy of German Idealism and initiated an objectivist turn that was instrumental in the development of leading philosophical movements of the 20th century, including analytic philosophy, phenomenology, and pragmatism. This volume seeks to demonstrate the importance of Lotze's thought to the history of philosophy. Part I addresses Lotze's influence on and relatedness to the thought of Franz Brentano, Thomas Hill Green, Francis Herbert Bradley, James Ward, Emily Elizabeth Constance Jones, William James, Edmund Husserl, Wilhelm Windelband, Gottlob Frege, and Ludwig Wittgenstein, and to two philosophers who brought Lotze to his turn in philosophy, Jakob Friedrich Fries and Johann Friedrich Herbart. Part II focuses on the connection between metaphysics and epistemology in the early Lotze, on the problem of value in Lotze's “greater” Logik, on his explorations on the foundations of mathematics, on the relationship between thought and language, on human sentience, on the method of hypotheses in science, and on Lotze's logic of existence and existence-entailing concepts.

The Philosophy of Rudolph Hermann Lotze will appeal to scholars and graduate students interested in the history of philosophy, particularly 19th-century German philosophy and the history of analytic philosophy and phenomenology.

Nikolay Milkov is a Professor of Philosophy at the University of Paderborn, Germany. He is the author of seven books including Early Analytic Philosophy and the German Philosophical Tradition (2020), Hermann Lotze's Influence on Twentieth Century Philosophy (2023) and The Tractatus, Wittgenstein’s Method and Analytic Philosophy (2025).

Michele Vagnetti is a Research Associate at the University of Florence. He is the author of Hermann Lotze on the Mind-Body Problem and the 19th Century Philosophy and Psychology: With Special Attention to William James (doctoral dissertation, 2020).