Hermann Lotze

Hermann Lotze (1817 to 1881) was a German philosopher and logician who also held a medical degree and was well versed in biology. Born in Bautzen in the Kingdom of Saxony, he studied at Leipzig under teachers such as E. H. Weber and Gustav Fechner, took a doctorate in medicine in 1838 and one in philosophy in 1840, and later succeeded Johann Friedrich Herbart in the chair of philosophy at Göttingen. His medical works, among them the 1852 Medizinische Psychologie oder Physiologie der Seele, applied to the human organism the mechanical principles used for inorganic phenomena, and are counted among the pioneering works of scientific psychology. He argued that if the physical world is governed by mechanical laws, the development of the universe can be explained as the functioning of a world mind.