The Great Delusion

Lotze tentatively located the distinction between human and non-human animals in a distinctive feature of human sentience , that is, our sensations and sensory feelings. Our sensory feelings, roughly speaking, track more values than those of the brutes. In this point Lotze’s view contrasts interestingly and importantly with Kant’s and Descartes’s view who take humans to have distinctive cognitive capacities. While Lotze himself was reluctant to endorse his view as an account of the distinction between man and brute, he took it to shed light on human sentience and our instinctive belief in a world that is external to us. The chapter introduces and expounds Lotze’s view and assesses its philosophical value.