ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses Hermann Lotze’s distinction between “hypostatic” and “logical” Platonism and focuses on the linguistic point he makes. A towering figure in late 19th- and early 20th-century German philosophy, Lotze was a major influence in continental Europe as well as England and North America. Lotze wrote about all major areas of philosophy, but the work for which he is primarily known is his Logik, first published in 1843 and then in a substantially revised version in 1874 as the first part of his System der Philosophie. Gottlob Frege's reputation has undergone the opposite reversal to Lotze’s: obscure in his own lifetime until he was “discovered” by Bertrand Russell and Ludwig Wittgenstein, Frege is recognized as one of the main figures of 19th-century philosophy and canonized as a founder of analytic philosophy. The context of Lotze’s fourfold distinction among kinds of actuality/being is his appropriation of Plato. Lotze creatively reads Plato’s metaphysics as fundamentally a theory of truth.
