Arthur Schopenhauer

"Schopenhauer" redirects here. For other uses, see Schopenhauer (disambiguation).

Arthur Schopenhauer
Schopenhauer in 1859
Born(1788-02-22)22 February 1788
Gdańsk (Danzig), Crown of the Kingdom of Poland, Polish–Lithuanian Commonwealth
Died21 September 1860(1860-09-21) (aged 72)
Frankfurt, German Confederation
Education
Relatives
Era19th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
School
InstitutionsUniversity of Berlin
Main interests
Metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, morality, psychology
Notable ideas
Signature

Arthur Schopenhauer (/ˈʃoʊpənhaʊər/ SHOH-pən-how-ər;[9] German: [ˈaʁtuːɐ̯ ˈʃoːpn̩haʊɐ] ⓘ; 22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. He is known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation (expanded in 1844), which characterizes the phenomenal world as the manifestation of a blind and irrational noumenal will.[10][11][12] Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant (1724–1804), Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism.[7][8]

Schopenhauer was among the first thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Indian philosophy, such as asceticism, denial of the self, and the notion of the world-as-appearance.[13] His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism.[14] Though his work failed to garner substantial attention during his lifetime, he had a posthumous impact across various disciplines, including philosophy, literature, and science. His writing on aesthetics, morality, and psychology have influenced many thinkers and artists.

  1. ^ "Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) (Internet Encyclopedia of Philosophy)".
  2. ^ Frederick C. Beiser reviews the commonly held position that Schopenhauer was a transcendental idealist and he rejects it: "Though it is deeply heretical from the standpoint of transcendental idealism, Schopenhauer's objective standpoint involves a form of transcendental realism, i.e. the assumption of the independent reality of the world of experience." (Beiser 2016, p. 40)
  3. ^ Voluntarism (philosophy) – Britannica.com
  4. ^ Arthur Schopenhauer, Arthur Schopenhauer: The World as Will and Presentation, Volume 1, Routledge, 2016, p. 211: "the world [is a] mere presentation, object for a subject ..."
  5. ^ Lennart Svensson, Borderline: A Traditionalist Outlook for Modern Man, Numen Books, 2015, p. 71: "[Schopenhauer] said that 'the world is our conception'. A world without a perceiver would in that case be an impossibility. But we can—he said—gain knowledge about Essential Reality for looking into ourselves, by introspection. ... This is one of many examples of the anthropic principle. The world is there for the sake of man."
  6. ^ Cite error: The named reference PhilPapers was invoked but never defined (see the help page).
  7. ^ a b The World as Will and Representation, vol. 3, Ch. 50.
  8. ^ a b Dale Jacquette, ed. (2007). Schopenhauer, Philosophy and the Arts. Cambridge University Press. p. 162. ISBN 978-0-521-04406-6. For Kant, the mathematical sublime, as seen for example in the starry heavens, suggests to imagination the infinite, which in turn leads by subtle turns of contemplation to the concept of God. Schopenhauer's atheism will have none of this, and he rightly observes that despite adopting Kant's distinction between the dynamical and mathematical sublime, his theory of the sublime, making reference to the struggles and sufferings of struggles and sufferings of Will, is unlike Kant's.
  9. ^ Wells, John C. (2008), Longman Pronunciation Dictionary (3rd ed.), Longman, ISBN 978-1-4058-8118-0
  10. ^ Arthur Schopenhauer (2004). Essays and Aphorisms. Penguin Classics. p. 23. ISBN 978-0-14-044227-4.
  11. ^ Magee, Bryan (14 August 1997). "The World as Will". The Philosophy of Schopenhauer (1 ed.). Oxford University PressOxford. pp. 137–163. doi:10.1093/0198237227.003.0007. ISBN 978-0-19-823722-8.
  12. ^ Vandenabeele, Bart (December 2007). "Schopenhauer on the Values of Aesthetic Experience". The Southern Journal of Philosophy. 45 (4): 565–582. doi:10.1111/j.2041-6962.2007.tb00065.x.
  13. ^ See the book-length study about oriental influences on the genesis of Schopenhauer's philosophy by Urs App: Schopenhauer's Compass. An Introduction to Schopenhauer's Philosophy and its Origins. Wil: UniversityMedia, 2014 (ISBN 978-3-906000-03-9)
    • Hergenhahn, B. R. (2009). An Introduction to the History of Psychology (6th ed.). Cengage Learning. p. 216. ISBN 978-0-495-50621-8. Although Schopenhauer was an atheist, he realized that his philosophy of denial had been part of several great religions; for example, Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism.
  14. ^ Arthur Schopenhauer (2004). Essays and Aphorisms. Penguin Classics. pp. 22–36. ISBN 978-0-14-044227-4. ...but there has been none who tried with so great a show of learning to demonstrate that the pessimistic outlook is justified, that life itself is really bad. It is to this end that Schopenhauer's metaphysic of will and idea exists.
    • Studies in Pessimism – audiobook from LibriVox.
    • David A. Leeming; Kathryn Madden; Stanton Marlan, eds. (2009). Encyclopedia of Psychology and Religion, Volume 2. Springer. p. 824. ISBN 978-0-387-71801-9. A more accurate statement might be that for a German—rather than a French or British writer of that time—Schopenhauer was an honest and open atheist.