The first full-length historical study of the intellectual origins and institutional context of the nineteenth-century German thinker Hermann Lotze.

William R. Woodward is a Professor of Psychology at the University of New Hampshire.

Introduction: a scientific biography between Biedermeier and modern cosmopolitan thought; Part I. Youth in Biedermeier: 1. Ancestry and education of a cultural reformer (1817-34); 2. Education in medical thought and practice: working explanations (1834-8); 3. Education in philosophy: the mathematical construction of space (1834-9); 4. A Gestalt metaphysics: laws, events, and values (1838-41); 5. Applying hypotheses in pathology and therapy (1838-42); 6. The dual model of explanation and speculation (1838-43); Part II. Emerging Bourgeois Liberalism: 7. Levels of physiological explanation (1843-51); 8. The physical-mental mechanism: an alternative to psychophysics (1846-52); 9. Inner migration or disguised reform: political interests of philosophical anthropology (1852-64); 10. Educating the bourgeois liberal in a culturally conservative time (1852-8); 11. The psychological turn of liberal theology (1858-64); Part III. The System in the Bismarck Period: 12. Empathy and beauty: moving aesthetics into the public sphere (1864-7); 13. Logic between scientific inquiry and speculative thought (1867-74); 14. The metaphysical foundations of modern science (1874-9); 15. The personal is the political: a cosmopolitan ethics (1864-81); Postscript: historiographic lessons of Lotze research.