Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer (22 February 1788-21 September 1860) was a German philosopher best known for his book, The World as Will and Idea (German: Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung), in which he claimed that our world is driven by a continually dissatisfied will, continually seeking satisfaction. Independently arriving at many of the same conclusions of Eastern philosophy, he maintained that the “truth was recognized by the sages of India”; consequently, his solutions to suffering were similar to those of Vedantic and Buddhist thinkers (e.g., asceticism). The influence of “transcendental ideality” led him to choose atheism.

At age 25, he published his doctoral dissertation, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, which examined the four distinct aspects of experience in the phenomenal world; consequently, he has been influential in the history of phenomenology. He has influenced many thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Richard Wagner, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Erwin Schrödinger, Albert Einstein, Sigmund Freud, Otto Rank, Carl Jung, Joseph Campbell, Leo Tolstoy, Thomas Mann, and Jorge Luis Borges, among others.