Arthur schopenhauer wife

Among the many philosophers who might claim our interest and finite energies, why read Schopenhauer?

Arthur schopenhauer quotes

Taken generally, it is a type of question that often haunts those with a scholarly stake in philosophers who represent outliers in mainstream views of the subject. In the case of Schopenhauer, it has sometimes taken its edge from a sense of ambivalence about how well his intellectual practice fits into contemporary ideas of how philosophy should be conducted.

Among many readers, admiration for the audacity and grandeur of the edifice of his philosophy as a whole has mingled with an uneasy sense that the philosophical arguments that hold it up are not the most compelling -- perhaps unsurprising coming from a thinker who believed philosophy was in the business not of compelling through argument, but of giving reflective articulation to feeling.

In this context, it has been especially difficult to determine how to negotiate those features of Schopenhauer's understanding that form the chief basis of his reputation. This includes, above all, his trenchantly proclaimed pessimism, summed up in the statement that, pace Leibniz's shallow optimism, ours "is the worst of all possible worlds" WWR , whose "non-existence would be preferable to its existence" WWR Yet as Nietzsche pointed out, even if the edifice erected by a philosopher is ultimately pulled down, "the bricks with which he built" can still "possess value as material.

Against a background assumption that the value of reading Schopenhauer stands in need of justification, they explore ways of unpicking the whole, isolating the most serviceable elements, and reconstructing these for philosophical use. Sandra Shapshay's book can be located in this context. It offers a reconstruction of one important strand of Schopenhauer's overall project, his ethical theory, particularly as spelled out in his essay On the Basis of Morality.

Careful consideration of Schopenhauer's ethics, Shapshay argues, reveals a conception that has "relevance for normative ethical theory" p. She designates this conception as "compassionate moral realism. Insofar as it tracks a real feature, compassion thus has a crucial epistemic function. This truth-tracking function in turn secures the normativity of the feeling of compassion.

The theory that emerges, Shapshay suggests, represents a hybrid of Kantian ethics and the sentimentalism associated with Hutcheson, Smith, and Hume.