THE WORLD AS WILL AND
REPRESENTATION
by
ARTHUR SCHOPENHAUER
Translated from the German by
E. F. J. Payne
In two volumes:
VOLUME I
Dover Publications, Inc.
New York
Translator's Introduction
Atenor Schopenhauer was born in the Hanseatic City of Danzig in 1788. His father was a well-to-do merchant of rugged independence and wide cultural interests, and his mother a woman of considerable intellectual gifts who in her day won fame as an authoress. At an early age, the son showed outstanding mental qualities, and soon embarked on an intensive study of the humanities, the empirical sciences, and philosophy at the Universities of Gottingen and Berlin. In 1813 he wrote his first work, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, a thesis which gained for him the degree of doctor of philosophy of Jena University, and in which he expounded his epistemology based on the Kantian doctrine of the ideality of space, time, and the categories.
From 1814 to 1818 Schopenhauer lived in Dresden, where his creative genius conceived and gave birth to a philosophical work which, for its depth and range of thought as well as for the clarity and brilliance of its style, was an outstanding achievement for so young a man. It was the more remarkable in that, during the forty-one years he was still to live after its publication, he did not consider it necessary to modify or recast in …