This image is the cover for the book The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 2 of 3), Classics To Go

The World as Will and Idea (Vol. 2 of 3), Classics To Go

The World as Will and Representation marked the pinnacle of Schopenhauer’s philosophical thought; he spent the rest of his life refining, clarifying, and deepening the ideas presented in this work without any fundamental changes. The first edition was met with near universal silence. The second edition of 1844 similarly failed to attract any interest. At the time, post-Kantian German academic philosophy was dominated by the German Idealists—foremost among them G. W. F. Hegel, whom Schopenhauer bitterly denounced as a ‘charlatan.’ It was not until the publication of his Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851 that Schopenhauer began to see the start of the recognition that eluded him for so long.

Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher. He is best known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, wherein he characterizes the phenomenal world as the product of a blind and malignant metaphysical will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism. He was among the first thinkers in Western philosophy to share and affirm significant tenets of Eastern philosophy, such as asceticism and the notion of the world-as-appearance. His work has been described as an exemplary manifestation of philosophical pessimism.

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