 The beginning of the Southwest School of Neo-Kantianism can arguably be located in Wilhelm Windelband’s 1883 essay, “Critical or Genetic Method?”, which for the first time both gives a clear exposition of the philosophical point of view that would characterize the Southwest school and argues explicitly for a return to Kant. However, many of the core ideas in that essay were already articulated by Windelband’s teacher, Hermann Lotze (1817–1881), principally in his Logic (1874). Lotze argued for a clean distinction between philosophy and psychology. Logic depends on the distinction between “truth and untruth”, and gives the laws that thought ought to obey, while psychology identifies the laws that mental processes do obey. Logic gives laws governing the content of thoughts, while psychology concerns acts of thinking (Lotze 1874: §x; §332; on the act/content distinction see also Lotze 1856–64: vol.2, 630; Lotze 1874: §337). The contents of thoughts are objective, inasmuch as they are not only shareable but have a reality independent of being thought. Though these contents are real, they do not occur (as events do), do not exist or have being (as things do), but are valid (1874: §§314–318). Though Lotze did not explicitly call for a return to Kant, he did articulate many of the themes that the SW Neo-Kantians located in Kant. Lotze argued that knowing cannot be considered a copying [Abbilden] of its object (§327); he held that knowledge requires a priori elements, and that apriority is not the same as innateness (§324); and more generally he positioned his philosophy as a middle ground between speculative idealism and materialism.