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    Schopenhauer: Philosophy in an Hour
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    Schopenhauer: Philosophy in an Hour
    Unavailable
    Schopenhauer: Philosophy in an Hour
    Audiobook1 hour

    Schopenhauer: Philosophy in an Hour

    Written by Paul Strathern

    Narrated by Jonathan Keeble

    4/5

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    Unavailable in your country

    About this audiobook

    Philosophy for busy people. Listen to a succinct account of the philosophy of Schopenhauer in just one hour.

    Arthur Schopenhauer, the ‘philosopher of pessimism,’ makes it clear that he regards the world and our life in it as a bad joke. However, if the world is indifferent to our fate it doesn’t thwart us deliberately – its façade is supported by what Schopenhauer calls the universal Will. He saw this as a force that is blind and without purpose, bringing on all our misery and suffering. Schopenhauer taught that our only hope is to liberate ourselves from the terrible power of the Will and from the trappings of individualism and egoism that are at its mercy.

    This audiobook is an expert account of Schopenhauer’s life and philosophical ideas – entertainingly written and above all easy listening. Also included are selections from Schopenhauer’s work, suggested further reading, and chronologies that place Schopenhauer in the context of the broader scheme of philosophy.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins Publishers
    Release dateJun 27, 2013
    ISBN9780007530557
    Unavailable
    Schopenhauer: Philosophy in an Hour
    Author

    Paul Strathern

    Paul Strathern is a Somerset Maugham Award-winning novelist, and his nonfiction works include The Venetians, Death in Florence, The Medici, Mendeleyev's Dream, The Florentines, Empire, and The Borgias, all available from Pegasus Books. He lives in England.

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    Reviews for Schopenhauer

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      The superb selection of quotations at the end illustrates the discussion beautifully. Listening to this wickedly witty essay was a pure joy.
    • 5/5
      A gripping story; his life was like an emotional roller coaster, filled with conflicts and contradictions as a child of the German bourgeoisie, with lifelong privilege and unearned income. This is a beautifully written account of Schopenhauer’s life and times. I listened to this book to discover, for the first time, what it was about Schopenhauer that gave him the insight and learning to reject the fascist obscurantism and sophistry of his contemporary, Hegel. This was after I learned about Hegel from Karl Popper’s deconstruction of Hegel in his book “The Open Society and its Enemies” (also a Scribd audiobook). What can be said about Mr Schopenhauer is that he was not at home in the real world that he struggled to understand, and in his attempt to do so, he developed his own epistemological model of reality. This incorporated the idea of a universal and indifferent Will, that is presumably an alternative to the God of Christianity. The Christian God had died in the minds of the German intelligentsia and literary world, leaving the empty void to be filled with some other construction. For Schopenhauer, this was a transcendent hypothesis, a higher but malevolent or indifferent power or reality we could never know. Life was thus meaningless and purposeless. If Schopenhauer was born into a later era, and ended up in one of Hitler’s death camps or or one of Stalin’s gulags, then he would really have something to write about. That human state-sponsored evil paradoxically produced great inspirational thinkers like Viktor Frankl and Alexandr Solzhenitsyn, who, in my opinion, produced much more worthwhile philosophies and insights about good and evil. These insights borne from suffering were on the side of Christianity, or the Christian prescription for life that necessitated the virtues of faith, hope and charity. Those virtues cannot be said to be embedded in the bleak and pessimistic writings of Schopenhauer.