Current work on first-person thought takes its distinctive feature to be epistemological. First-person thinking is non-observational and immune to errors to which other varieties of thought about us are open. In contrast, the nineteenth century philosopher Hermann Lotze (1817-81) put the distinctive concern we have for the object of first-person thought at the center of his account. His arguments suggest that first-person thought is essentially evaluative. In this paper I will reconstruct and defend the core of Lotze’s view of self-consciousness.

It has been said that, after the fall of modernism, Hermann Lotze (1817-81) reigned as the single most influential philosopher in Germany, perhaps the world” (Sullivan 2008: 2). It is now not easy to take such claims about Lotze seriously, and historical surveys of nineteenth century philosophy treat him as a marginal figure, if they mention him at all. Part of the explanation of this change in his standing becomes clear if we accept Sullivan’s helpful observation that Lotze was a (...) ‘prominent... (shrink)