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HERMANN LOTZE — SCIENCE, BELIEF AND THE LATE NINETEENTH CENTURY theory of knowledge which was adopted by a few thinkers in England to attack the positivist trend there. There he was first known as a critic of Hegel, but afterwards his whole work became appreciated. Although it is excessive to say that Lotze was a Pragmatist avant la lettre, William James, together with Charles Peirce (1839-1914) the father of Pragmatism, came to modify his Pragmatism in line with what he learned in Gottingen. James put aside the speculative metaphysical and immaterial world of Lotze, to embrace the typical American way of looking at things. What is, is what has success, instead of “what is, is what ought to be”. The influence of Lotze on Edmund Husserl’s (1859-1938) Phenomenology could be summarized as follows. Husserl took over the anti-psychologist attitude, but more radically than Lotze, because he intended to eliminate all elements or viewpoints which could be interpreted as subjectivist. After all Husserl wanted to design a scientific radical objective philosophy, thereby creating his concept of uniformity of mental activity. At the same time Gottlob Frege (1848-1925) is the main, but not the only link between analytic philosophy and Lotze. Central is his logic and his anti-psychologist approach, but also the special relation between logic and arithmetic. Analytic philosophy however developed rapidly away from an Idealistic viewpoint.* Apart from Lotze’s influence on different movements in thinking, attention also can be focused on different fields. In the ethical domain, for instance, Lotze showed the importance of appreciation, which he had discerned already at the epistemological level. The feelings generate valuation, but the values, experienced in concrete situations, do not solely depend on the feelings. The feelings enable the existence of values. They are so to speak catalysts. In theology especially Lotze’s epistemology and concept of the soul are responsible for the development of Protestant thinking in Germany and Methodism in the USA, but also for the development of Personalism. In aesthetics the beginning of the concept “aesthetic sympathy” can be traced back to Lotze’s Grundzüge der Aesthetik. In system theory Reinhart Pester found remarkable analogies between the system theory of Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1972) and what Pester calls Lotze’s “information” theory.’ As to value theory, Lotze’s definition was somewhat ambiguous. The feelings are 3 Cf. MENDEHLSON, Richard L., The Philosophy of Gottlob Frege, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2005. PESTER, Reinhart, Hermann Lotze: Wege seines Denkens und Forschens. Ein Kapitel Deutscher Philosophy- und Wissenschaftsgeschichte im 19. Jahrhundert, Würzburg, Königshausen & Neumann, 1997.; Davipson, Mark, Uncommon Sense: The Life and Thought of Ludwig von Bertalanffy (1901-1971), Father of General Systems Theory, Los Angeles, J.P. Tarcher, 1983. e 231"
