Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer was born in 1788 in Danzig (now Gdańsk) into a wealthy merchant family. After his father’s death he abandoned a business career for philosophy, studying at Göttingen and Berlin. In 1813–14 he came to know the Upaniṣads through a Latin translation of a Persian version, the Oupnek’hat of Anquetil-Duperron, which he called the consolation of his life.

His main work, The World as Will and Representation, was published in 1819 and largely ignored. He lectured briefly in Berlin, scheduling his lectures against Hegel’s, and attracted few students. From 1833 he lived in Frankfurt, a private scholar, expanding his system in a second volume (1844) and later essays. Fame came only in the 1850s, with his essays Parerga and Paralipomena. He died in Frankfurt in 1860.

Schopenhauer influenced Nietzsche, Wagner, Freud, Tolstoy and Wittgenstein, among many others, and was one of the first European philosophers to treat Indian and Buddhist thought as philosophy to be taken seriously. His understanding of those traditions was limited by the sources available to him, but he found in them, he believed, confirmation of his own conclusions.