Author, text and context

Arthur Schopenhauer is one of the most remarkable, yet iconoclastic and uncharacteristic, of the great thinkers of nineteenth-century German idealism. A post-Kantian philosopher who disassociated himself from the mainstream post-Kantians, Hegel, Fichte and Schelling, Schopenhauer weaves together the natural science of his day with transcendental metaphysics inspired especially by the writings of Plato and Kant, and the mysticism and compassionate ethics of Asian religious philosophy in Buddhist and Hindu traditions.

Schopenhauer's masterwork, Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung, was published as a single volume in 1818, and reissued in a revised and expanded two-volume second edition in 1844, followed by a third edition in 1859, the year before his death. In its English translations as The World as Will and Idea or The World as Will and Representation, the book's title indicates a division of the world into two metaphysical aspects. Schopenhauer distinguishes between the world as it is represented to thought, known to common sense and empirical science, and as it exists independently of thought as Kantian thing-in-itself. He further identifies thing-in-itself, in what he claims is his unique philosophical discovery, as the transcendental Will.

The first edition of Schopenhauer's text is divided into four books. The same four books also appear in the second and third editions in revised and updated form as the first of two volumes.