Schopenhauer is one of the great original writers ofthe nineteenth century, and a unique voice in thehistory of thought. His central concept of the willleads him to regard human beings as strivingirrationally and suffering in a world that has nopurpose, a condition redeemed by the elevation ofaesthetic consciousness and finally overcome by thewill's self-denial and a mystical vision of the selfas one with the world as a whole. He is in some waysthe most progressive post-Kantian, an atheist withprofound ideas about the human essence and themeaning of existence which point forward toNietzsche, Freud and existentialism. He was also thefirst major Western thinker to seek a synthesis withEastern thought. Yet at the same time he undertakesan ambitious global metaphysics of a conservative,more or less pre-Kantian kind, and is driven by aPlatonic vision of escape from empirical realityinto a realm of higher knowledge.

Schopenhauer was born in 1788, and by 1809 had goneagainst his family's expectations of a career as amerchant and embarked on a university career. Hecompleted his doctoral dissertation On the Fourfold Root of the Principleof Sufficient Reason in 1813, then spentseveral years in intensive preparation of whatbecame the major work of his life, The World as Will andRepresentation, which was published atthe end of 1818, with 1819 on the title page.Shortly afterwards his academic career suffered asetback when his only attempt at a lecture courseended in failure. Thereafter Schopenhauer adopted astance of intellectual self-sufficiency andantagonism towards university philosophy, for whichhe was repaid by a singular lack of reaction to hiswritings. In 1835 he published On Will in Nature, an attempt tocorroborate his metaphysics with findings from thesciences, and in 1841 two self-standing essays onfree will and moral philosophy, entitled The Two Fundamental Problems ofEthics. A large supplementary secondvolume to The World as Will andRepresentation appeared in 1844,accompanied by a revised version of the originalwhich now appeared as Volume One; then in 1851another two-volume work, Parerga and Paralipomena, a collectionof essays and observations.