The Oxford Handbook of Schopenhauer

Abstract

This collection of thirty-one essays written by contemporary Schopenhauer scholars has six sections: (1) Influences on Schopenhauer, (2) Schopenhauer’s Metaphysics of Will and Empirical Knowledge, (3) Aesthetic Experience, Music, and the Sublime, (4) Human Meaning, Politics, and Morality, (5) Religion and Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, and (6) Schopenhauer’s Influence. Some of the issues addressed concern the extent to which Schopenhauer adopted ideas from his predecessors versus how much was original and visionary in his central claim that reality is a blind, senseless “will,” the effectiveness of his philosophy in the field of scientific explanation and extrasensory phenomena, the role of beauty and sublimity in his outlook, the fundamental role of compassion in his moral theory, the Hindu, Christian, and Buddhistic aspects of his philosophy, the importance of asceticism in his views on how best to live, how pessimism and optimism should be understood, and his impact on psychoanalysis, as well as upon music, the visual arts, and literature. The collection is an internationally constituted work that reflects upon Schopenhauer’s philosophy with authors from a variety of backgrounds, presently working in Australia, Belgium, Brazil, Canada, Ecuador, England, France, Germany, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Scotland, Spain, and the United States.