Rudolf Hermann Lotze

Born May 21, 1817, in Bautzen; died July 1, 1881, in Berlin. German philosopher, physician, and natural scientist.

Lotze was a professor of philosophy at the universities of Leipzig (from 1842), Göttingen (1844-81), and Berlin (1881). In his Medical Psychology (1852) and other specialized works on medicine and physiology, he defended certain tenets of mechanistic materialism, while criticizing vitalism. In his philosophical works, including Mikrokosmus (vols. 1-3, 1856-64; Russian translation, parts 1-3, 1866-67) and A System of Philosophy (1874-79), he developed ideas of objective idealism close to Leibnizian monadism. Lotze introduced the teleological concept of standards of meaning as a specific characteristic of the content of thought in cognition theory and logic; analogously, he introduced the concept of value in ethics.