Lotze Rudolf Hermann (1817–81), German philosopher and influential representative of post-Hegelian German metaphysics. Lotze was born in Bautzen and studied medicine, mathematics, physics, and philosophy at Leipzig, where he became instructor, first in medicine and later in philosophy. His early views, expressed in his Metaphysik (1841) and Logik (1843), were influenced by C. H. Weisse, a former student of Hegel’s. He succeeded J. F. Herbart as professor of philosophy at Göttingen, where he served from 1844 until shortly before his death. Between 1856 and 1864, he published, in three volumes, his best-known work, Mikrocosmus. Logik (1874) and Metaphysik (1879) were published as the first two parts of his unfinished three-volume System der Philosophie.
While Lotze shared the metaphysical and systematic appetites of his German idealist predecessors, he rejected their intellectualism, favoring an emphasis on the primacy of feeling; believed that metaphysics must fully respect the methods, results, and ‘mechanistic’ assumptions of the empirical sciences; and saw philosophy as the never completed attempt to raise and resolve questions arising from the inevitable pluralism of methods and interests involved in science, ethics, and the arts. A strong personalism is manifested in his assertion that feeling discloses to us a relation to a personal deity and its teleological workings in nature. His most enduring influences can be traced, in America, through Royce, Santayana, B. P. Bowne, and James, and, in England, through Bosanquet and Bradley. See also IDEALISM, PERSONALIS. J.P.Su.