Lotze's Philosophy of Psychology

Abstract This book aims to introduce and assess Hermann Lotze’s (1817–1881) main contributions to philosophy of psychology and mind. Lotze was the most influential philosopher of his time. He revitalized German philosophy after Hegel’s death and inspired American Pragmatists as well as British Idealists. In his work Lotze brought medical research, metaphysics, and psychology together and argued for an approach to psychology in which the soul is central. He defended the soul, the irreducibility of the mental, and the interaction between soul and body. In doing so he proposed views of feeling, attention, self-consciousness, the unity of consciousness. These views were discussed in Lotze’s time but are now unjustly neglected. The book provides a rational reconstruction of these views and their interconnection. It examines in detail Lotze’s affective view of self-consciousness and his view of comparing, the activity in which we attain awareness of relations. The latter fuels an original argument for the existence of the soul and its importance for psychology. This argument is also seen as a refutation of panpsychism, the view that fundamental reality is made of ‘mind-stuff’. The book pays attention throughout to the historical background of Lotze’s thought as well as to discussions of Lotze’s work in American and British philosophy, and thereby sheds light on how his thought shaped American Pragmatism and British Idealism.