Knowra Arthur Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher whose metaphysics treats the world as the manifestation of a blind, striving will and whose ethics emphasizes compassion and the denial of desire.
Thing-in-itself : In Kantian philosophy, reality as it exists independently of human experience and representation. Schopenhauer reinterpreted Kant’s unknowable thing-in-itself as will.
Principle of individuation : The conditions, especially space and time, through which reality appears as a plurality of distinct individuals. It explains how one underlying will appears as many separate beings.
Immanuel Kant : An eighteenth-century German philosopher who founded critical philosophy and distinguished appearances from things in themselves. Schopenhauer regarded Kant’s distinction as the starting point for his own metaphysics.
Compassion : Sensitivity to another being’s suffering that motivates concern or action to relieve it. Schopenhauer made compassion the basis of moral conduct.
Friedrich Nietzsche : A German philosopher whose writings challenged inherited morality, religion, and metaphysics. Nietzsche began under Schopenhauer’s influence before rejecting his pessimism and denial of life.
Representation : For Schopenhauer, the world as it appears to a subject under the forms of space, time, and causality. It names the phenomenal side of his distinction between appearance and will.
Causality : The relation in which one event or state produces or determines another. For Schopenhauer, causality structures appearances but does not explain the will in itself.
Plato : An ancient Greek philosopher whose writings explore forms, knowledge, ethics, and political life. Schopenhauer drew on Plato’s Forms in his account of aesthetic knowledge.
Ethical egoism : The normative view that people ought to act in their own self-interest. Schopenhauer’s compassion-based ethics rejects self-interest as the sole moral guide.
Sigmund Freud : An Austrian neurologist who founded psychoanalysis and emphasized unconscious mental processes. Freud’s account of unconscious motivation is often compared with Schopenhauer’s irrational will.
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