Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy [Paperback]

Christopher Janaway (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 23, 1999 | ISBN-10: 0198250037 | ISBN-13: 978-0198250036

Janaway provides a detailed and critical account of Schopenhauer's central philosophical achievement: his account of the self and its relation to the world of objects. The author's approach to this theme is historical, yet is designed to show the philosophical interest of such an approach. He explores in unusual depth Schopenhauer's often ambivalent relation to Kant, and highlights the influence of Schopenhauer's view of self and world on Wittgenstein and Nietzsche, as well as tracing the many points of contact between Schopenhauer's thought and current philosophical debates about the self.

Editorial Reviews

Review

"An unusual and superlative work that does more than justice to the epistemic and metaphysical issues that lie at the heart of a philosophical understanding of the self and the world....What is striking about this original study is the detailed and illuminating analysis of the Kantian background of Schopenhauer's thought, the careful examination of Schopenhauer's idealist standpoint, his distinctions between subject and object, and the thoughtful and insightful analyses of 'will' and 'willing.'"--Choice

About the Author

Christopher Janaway is Reader in Philosophy at Birkbeck College, University of London.

Product Details

• Paperback: 392 pages
• Publisher: Oxford University Press, USA (September 23, 1999)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0198250037
• ISBN-13: 978-0198250036
• Product Dimensions: 9.7 x 7.5 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,704,330 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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5 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Self seen, self unseen, November 14, 2002

By 

John C. Landon "nemonemini" (New York City) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy (Paperback)

The appearance of Kant's critiques resulted very swiftly in what some thought a series of contradictions, as in the famous problem of double affection. The swiftly moving stream passes via Fichte to Hegel as the core distinction of the noumenal and phenomenal is factored into a nearly opposite result. As if standing by to watch this current and respond with a gesture of the original vision, Schopenhauer with brilliant insight attempts to assess these reactions with a streamlined recursion of the Kantian perspective. Janaway's cogent summary and critique is surprising in its acumen, and a trifle cold in its assessement of Schopenhauer's quirky yet solid version of 'transcendental idealism'. But then the fan of Schopenhauer tends to linger in a vision whose logical complexities are actually well served by this unsentimental analysis. One is put to work on the strange paradoxes of self and appearance in the context of one who braves these dangerous waters that later analytical philosophy would be so determined to rid us of. Schopenhauer's corpus is either ignored or made into a belief system, here we see a way via critique that it might be exercised to its limits and understood, unless the severity of the analyis of what is always a brittle philosophy pointing to a deeper noumenal reality is taken as some final reduction of the 'fallacy' of the whole endeavor. The irony is that Kant and Schopenhauer always seem to survive their critics, here they are both, I should think, well served by one such.
Challenging work for anyone alert to this irascible campanion of the great period of German philosophy.