Arthur Schopenhauer | |
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![]() Schopenhauer in 1859 | |
Born | |
Died | 21 September 1860 | (aged 72)
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Era | 19th-century philosophy |
Region | Western philosophy |
School | |
Institutions | University of Berlin |
Main interests | Metaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, morality, psychology |
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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.
PhilPapers
was invoked but never defined (see the help page).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.
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.
...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.
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.
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