Collected Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer

Arthur Schopenhauer's essays remain among the most forceful, lucid, and unsparing works of nineteenth-century philosophy. Collected Essays of Arthur Schopenhauer gathers forty-two shorter works drawn from seven classic essay collections: Counsels and Maxims, On Human Nature, On Religion, Studies in Pessimism, The Art of Controversy, The Art of Literature, and The Wisdom of Life. Together they present Schopenhauer as philosopher, moralist, literary critic, psychologist, and fierce observer of human vanity, ambition, suffering, belief, argument, art, and self-deception.

In these essays, Schopenhauer writes with unusual directness on conduct, character, reputation, religion, education, authorship, reading, rhetoric, happiness, pessimism, and the limits of human reason. His thought is severe but bracing: sceptical of easy consolation, suspicious of intellectual fashion, and relentlessly attentive to the motives beneath civilised behaviour. This substantial collection offers one of the most accessible entrances into Schopenhauer's philosophy, bringing together the aphoristic brilliance and dark clarity that made him a lasting influence on modern philosophy, literature, psychology, and existential thought.