Arthur Schopenhauer
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Arthur Schopenhauer
Full nameArthur Schopenhauer
Born22 February 1788(1788-02-22)
Danzig
Died21 September 1860 (aged 72)
Frankfurt
Era19th century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolKantianism, idealism
Main interestsMetaphysics, aesthetics, ethics, phenomenology, morality, psychology
Notable ideasWill, Fourfold root of reason, pessimism
Influenced by[show]
Plato, Kant, Upanishads, Goethe, Shakespeare, Spinoza, Giordano Bruno, Locke, Hume, Berkeley, Buddhism
Influenced[show]
Samuel Beckett, Henri Bergson, Jorge Luis Borges, Luitzen Egbertus Jan Brouwer, Jacob Burckhardt, Clarence Darrow, Albert Einstein, Mihai Eminescu, Sigmund Freud, John N. Gray,[1] Knut Hamsun, Thomas Hardy, Eduard von Hartmann, Hermann Hesse, Max Horkheimer, Joris-Karl Huysmans, Johannes Itten, Robinson Jeffers, Carl Jung, Karl Kraus, Jules Laforgue, Suzanne Langer, Thomas Mann, Guy de Maupassant, Philipp Mainländer, Ettore Majorana, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Popper, Marcel Proust, Gilbert Ryle, George Santayana, Jean-Paul Sartre, Erwin Schrödinger, Dylan Thomas, Leo Tolstoy, Hans Vaihinger, Vivekananda, Richard Wagner, Otto Weininger, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Peter Wessel Zapffe, Michel Houellebecq
Signature
Schopenhauer's birthplace — house in Danzig , now Gdańsk, ul. Św. Ducha
Grave at Frankfurt Hauptfriedhof
Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788 – 21 September 1860) was a German philosopher known for his pessimism and philosophical clarity. At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the fundamental question of whether reason alone can unlock answers about the world.
Schopenhauer's most influential work, The World as Will and Representation, claimed that the world is fundamentally what we recognize in ourselves as our will. His analysis of will led him to the conclusion that emotional, physical, and sexual desires can never be fulfilled. Consequently, he eloquently described a lifestyle of negating desires, similar to the ascetic teachings of Vedanta and the Desert Fathers of early Christianity.[2]
Schopenhauer's metaphysical analysis of will, his views on human motivation and desire, and his aphoristic writing style influenced many well-known thinkers including Friedrich Nietzsche,[3] Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein,[4] Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Gustav Jung, Leo Tolstoy, and Jorge Luis Borges.