Frederick Copleston on Schopenhauer

The great masters of philosophy are all, without a doubt, creative and brilliant thinkers who managed to see a complex network of connections underlying the structure of all reality. Few are more interesting and perceptive than German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer, one of the last philosophical systematizers to create a coherent model of reality that included metaphysics, epistemology, ethics, aesthetics, introspection, motivation and emotion.

His meditations from first principles of rationality would eventually lead him to postulate principles that were confirmed a century later through the work of Einstein’s relativity, and his thoughts on the unconscious would later be taken up and further developed by Nietzsche and Freud. Working within the framework of Kant’s transcendental idealism, and driving many of these insights to their logical conclusion, Schopenhauer managed to reach outlooks eerily reminiscent of Hinduist and Buddhist traditions, uniting for the first time Western and Eastern schools of thought.

In the following conversation with Frederick Copleston, the always eloquent Bryan Magee discusses the philosophy of this fascinating German intellectual in ways that will have you run to pick up your copy of The World as Will and Representation.

Why can’t we get television like this in America?!?

Hungry for more? Check out Schopenhauer's thoughts on love and sex,  or watch this fascinating conversation in which Peter Singer discusses the dialectical philosophy of Hegel and Marx.
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