Lotze on (Non)Existence and Reality

In this chapter, I give a detailed reconstruction of Lotze’s conception of existence. In the introduction, I distinguish between three different schools of thought concerning the relation between the existent and the non-existent and their main branches. I show to which branch of which school of thought Lotze’s view belongs. In the first main section, I outline how Lotze conceives of the conceptual relations between the concept of existence, being and reality. In the second section, I reconstruct Lotze’s holistic view on the concept of existence in detail. In the third one, I outline Lotze’s original and neglected version of the distinction between existence entailing concepts and those that lack this property. In the final section, I am concerned with Lotze’s view on the existential import of quantified expression. I show that it proposes a very interesting and neglected alternative to the two contemporary standard views on this topic.