Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist

"It’s very interesting the way academia has treated Arthur Schopenhauer . He dropped out of academia, lived independently, and was a powerful literary-philosophical outsider figure in his day. He was a superb essayist, influenced heavily by Immanuel Kant and his metaphysics, but also by Eastern philosophy. He was a wonderfully clear writer, but he doesn’t get studied much in philosophy departments—not at all during my degree, and I think in most people’s philosophy degrees—and that’s a shame. This despite his most important book The World as Will and Idea being an acknowledged philosophical classic. He should be studied more, not least because he’s a model of clarity in how he writes. For a German philosopher of the 18th and 19th centuries (he straddled both), that’s pretty unusual. The great champion of Schopenhauer in Britain was Bryan Magee. Schopenhauer, along with Popper, was one of his heroes and he wrote a very good introduction to his work The Philosophy of Schopenhauer that was published in 1983. But since then, there haven’t been many books about Schopenhauer at all, and nothing that I can think of that would appeal to a general reader. This book by David Bather Woods, who is one of a new generation coming fresh to the history of philosophy, is superb. It reminded me of Sarah Bakewell’s book on Montaigne , which was a huge success, and very widely-read. That combined biography with Montaigne’s ideas. Bather Woods has an elegance of style and is a good storyteller too. He’s really immersed in the world of Schopenhauer—he’s an academic expert on him— but he’s never boring or pedantic. This is a very readable book that also combines biography and ideas. And it does it very well. This would make an excellent Christmas present for people who enjoy reading about philosophy and philosophers. It has plenty of anecdotes and interesting insights that make it a pleasure to engage with in addition to the philosophical discussion."