About the author …

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), born near Danzig, Poland, was reared in a merchant family. Upon the annexation of Danzig by Prussia in 1793, his family moved to Hamburg. While still young, Schopenhauer traveled extensively in Europe and lived for a short time in France and England. His father hoped he would take over the family business as an international merchant, but soon after the death of his father, he left the family business to prepare for the university. His mother, Johanna, opened an intellectual salon, and, as a well-known novelist, developed a friendship with Wolfgang von Goethe. Schopenhauer studied medicine and philosophy at Göttingen and then, after moving to Jena, became enthralled with Plato's and Kant's philosophy. His dissertation The Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason laid the foundation for his magnum opus The World as Will and Idea: a work published at the age of thirty. He tried to lecture at the same time as Hegel lectured at the University of Berlin where he criticized both J.G. Fichte's and G.W.F. Hegel's works. Nevertheless, Schopenhauer's classes were largely ignored by the enthusiastic adherents of Hegel's philosophy. Years later, however, Schopenhauer's philosophy overshadowed Hegel's in influence. Schopenhauer left Berlin and spent most of the remainder of his life in Frankfort. His writing greatly influenced the work of persons in a variety of fields: Nietzsche and Wittgenstein, Freud and Jung, Hardy and Conrad, and Wagner and Rimsky-Korsakov.