I argue against a prevailing interpretation of Schopenhauer’s account of inner awareness and world-understanding. Because scholars have typically taken on board the assumption that inner awareness is non-representational, they have concerned themselves in the main with how to transfer this immediate cognition of will in ourselves and apply it to our understanding of the world–as–representation. Some scholars propose that the relation of the world-as-will to the world-as-representation is to be understood in figurative or metaphorical terms. I disagree because, for Schopenhauer, (...) inner awareness reveals a genuine philosophical truth. Some scholars also suggest that it is only via analogical transference that one can interpret the world as having the same inner nature as oneself. I disagree and point out the downside of this suggestion. I use both textual evidence and general philosophical considerations to demonstrate that inner awareness, for Schopenhauer, has a representational dimension. Overlooking this point has led scholars to misconstrue how inner awareness relates to world-understanding. I provide an alternative interpretation against figurative and analogical readings. I propose that, for Schopenhauer, we cognize partially a priori that all things are merely different expressions of the same activity that we are acquainted with in inner awareness. (shrink)

Schopenhauer repeatedly claims that all pleasure is negative, and this view seems to play key roles throughout his work. Nonetheless, many scholars have argued that Schopenhauer actually acknowledges certain positive pleasures. Two major arguments have been offered for this reading, one focused on the link between Schopenhauer's view of pleasure and Plato's, and one focused on Schopenhauer's distinction between two components of aesthetic pleasure. I argue that neither way of motivating the positive pleasure reading succeeds. Both overlook a key aspect (...) of Schopenhauer's account: namely, his suggestion that there are two distinct kinds of negative pleasure, pleasures of satisfaction and pleasures of distraction. When Schopenhauer claims that all pleasure is negative, he means it. (shrink)

Pessimism is, roughly, the view that life is not worth living. In chapter 46 of the second volume of The World as Will and Representation, Arthur Schopenhauer provides an oft-neglected argument for this view. The argument is that a life is worth living only if it does not contain any uncompensated evils; but since all our lives happen to contain such evils, none of them are worth living. The now standard interpretation of this argument (endorsed by Kuno Fischer and Christopher (...) Janaway) proceeds from the claim that the value—or rather valuelessness—of life’s goods makes compensation impossible. But this interpretation is neither philosophically attractive nor faithful to the text. In this paper, I develop and defend an alternative interpretation (suggested by Wilhelm Windelband and Mark Migotti) according to which it is instead the actual temporal arrangement of life’s goods and evils that makes compensation impossible. (shrink)

I suggest that Sidgwick, in his controversial “distinction passage,” has Schopenhauer in mind as someone who denies egoism on the ground that there are no separate individuals. I then reconstruct Sidgwick's argument in the passage. I take him to be defending a presupposition of the case for choosing egoism over utilitarianism. He is claiming that there are separate individuals. I close by rejecting alternative interpretations, on which Sidgwick is arguing directly for egoism.

This essay focuses on Schopenhauer’s aesthetics and philosophy of art, areas of his philosophy which have attracted the most philosophical attention in recent years. After discussing the subjective and objective aspects of aesthetic experience on his account, I shall offer interpretations of Schopenhauer’s theory of the sublime and solution to the problem of tragedy. In addition, I shall touch upon the liveliest interpretive debates concerning his aesthetic theory: the intelligibility of the “Platonic Ideas” as the objects of aesthetic experience and (...) the very possibility of aesthetic experience within Schopenhauer’s system. Another aim of this essay is to suggest how some of Schopenhauer’s aesthetic doctrines may be interpreted in a less metaphysically extravagant way. When understood in this manner, contemporary aestheticians might be inclined to take a closer look at Schopenhauer’s aesthetic theory and philosophy of art, for it is distinctive in the tradition of Western philosophical aesthetics in its attempt to highlight and balance the hedonic and cognitive importance of aesthetic experiences; in its sensitivity both to the aesthetic experience of nature as well as of art; in the high value placed on the experience of music ; and in the innovative solution to the problem of tragedy it offers. (shrink)

This paper seeks to illuminate Schopenhauer’s notion of the negation or denial of the will by investigating the figure of the saint within his philosophy. We argue that various discussions in Schop...

The ‘Platonic Ideas’ in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics are appearances. On the other hand, as the immediate objecthood of the will, they are the essences of species and the only object of true aesthetic cognition, which leads beyond mere appearance. To explain this apparent incongruence, I offer an analysis of Schopenhauer’s early metaphysics, and its transformation into the metaphysics of will, fleshing out the several and divergent concepts of ‘idea’. Specifically, first, as part of his religious and neo-Platonic early philosophy; second, in (...) the context of his ‘true criticism’ in the spirit of Kantian transcendental philosophy; third, as identical to the thing in itself as part of the metaphysics of will, heavily influenced by Kant’s notion of ideas from CR and CJ. Explaining Schopenhauer’s mature notion of Platonic Ideas genetically as a set of homonymic notions helps us better explain its divergent meanings in WWR. (shrink)

Lyric poetry, often regarded as the epitome of subjectivity in the realm of artistic expression, emerges from the depths of the poet’s personal emotions. Hence, in the aesthetic landscape of the nineteenth-century Germany, it was excluded from the inventory of genuine art forms, all of which were deemed to be objective and disinterested. Associating lyric poetry with music in its origin and essence, Nietzsche extends his Schopenhauerian metaphysics of music to the lyric, making it a highly objective art reverberating from (...) the abyss of existence, the Ur-Eine, expressing its intrinsic self-contradictory and agonizing nature. A similar understanding of the creative process of poetic composition in the lyric, which this article aims to elucidate, can also be found in some of Rūmī’s ghazals and observations. These include a metaphysics of the unseen, a reunion through ecstasy and rapture, and a reflection and mirroring, initially through music and then through the lyric. (shrink)