Product Description

This is a revised and enlarged version of Bryan Magee's widely praised study of Schopenhauer, the most comprehensive book on this great philosopher. It contains a brief biography of Schopenhauer, a systematic exposition of his thought, and a critical discussion of the problems to which it gives rise and of its influence on a wide range of thinkers and artists. For this new edition Magee has added three new chapters and made many minor revisions and corrections throughout. This new edition will consolidate the book's standing as the definitive study of Schopenhauer.

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #384823 in Books
• Published on: 1997-10-30
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 480 pages

Review
Magee's study should however not merely be reviewed but also read; for it is thorough, lucid and wide-ranging...a substantial work. Times Higher Education Supplement

About the Author

Brian Magee is a noted philosopher, writer, critic, and broadcaster. His publications include Men of Ideas (1982), The Great Philosophers (1988), and (with Martin Milligan) On Blindness (1995). He has held visiting fellowships at Yale and Oxford Universities, among others. He has been Honorary Senior Research Fellow in the History of Ideas at King's College, London since 1984, and he is an Honorary Fellow at Keble College, Oxford.

Customer Reviews

A Lucky Convergence
Bryan Magee is an ideal candidate for the role of expositor of Schopenhauer. One of Schopenhauer's defining characteristics is his passion for the arts; it is a passion that Magee shares. Schopenhauer is as good a writer as you'll find among major philosophers, and Magee is an easy and graceful stylist himself. Moreover, Magee is a bit of an outsider. And Schopenhauer, for all his appeal, has never quite made it to the first team among philosophers. Indeed, one of the most intriguing points about him is that he seems to have exercised far more influence over artists: Turgenev, Proust, Mann and (most of all) Wagner. Indeed, as a kind of afterthought, Magee offers a "conjecture" that a Schopenhauerian substrate underlies Dylan Thomas' great short lyric, "The force that through the green fuse drives the flower ..."

It's a lucky convergence because Schopenhauer certainly needs an introduction. Not because of the style: as I said above, Schopenhauer is a wonderful stylist, exactly not what you expect from a 19th-century German. But if Schopenhauer did not end quite in the mainstream of western philosophy, he certainly started there. He venerated Kant and he hated Hegel. He set himself the task of finishing or correcting Kant, without ever modifying his admiration for the master. This means that to understand Schopenhauer you need to know something about Kant. And here, Magee does a wonderful job. Magee's introduction to Kant would, with minor emendation, stand pretty well on its own. His exhibition of how Schopenhauer fits into the Kantian framework is equally deft.

In the same vein, he offers an indispensable strategy for reading Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer is one of those authors who wrote only one book "The World as Will and Idea." The standard edition is two volumes: a first volume that he wrote as a self-contained work, and a second, which counts as a kind of "extension of remarks" that developed over the rest of his life." But before his great work, he wrote a dissertation, "On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason," which Magee declares to be "a minor philosophical classic." It is, at any rate, an integral part of Schopenhauer's lifelong project, and a reader of the major work will do well to have the dissertation (or at least Magee's summary) behind him. A couple of other "independent" essays help to fill out of the frame. One of Magee's many helpful courtesies is that he tells you just what and why.

This book is so good in its own right that one is hesitant to seem to criticize Magee for not writing even more. Still, Magee's account did whet my appetite to know more about how Schopenhauer fits into the tradition of German thought to which he made himself such an outsider. That would be a project in its own right, but you do get a bit of it in the second-best book about Schopenhauer that I know of: Rudiger Safranski's "Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy." But hey-read them both, and with luck, they will carry you on to Schopenhauer himself.

A Great Introduction to an Important Philosopher's Work
This book is a great introduction to one of the 19th century's most important thinkers. But more than this, it clarifies many of the misunderstandings about this thinker's ideas. This is not Schopenhauer as learned through Nietzsche or any other person with an agenda of his own; it is an invaluable resource for the intelligent person who is interested in reading about the thoughts of a great thinker as he originally stated them. Through the large amount of direct quotes from Schopenhauer's work, one can begin to appreciate his style and clarity as a writer. Magee has done a terrific job, and I hope that this book will continue to help more people encounter the wonderful ideas of Schopenhauer.

Just another five stars
I would just like to echo the wonderful reviews that others have already given for this text, and to give it another five stars. As a serious student of Schopenhauer and of his commentators, I believe that Magee's grasp of Schopenhauer is simply astounding. Magee transforms Schopenhuaer from some obscure German philosopher from days long gone into a pressingly relevant thinker for our modern understanding of the universe. Magee has convinced me that Schopenhauer's understanding of the world is one of the most persuasive candidates out there. One of Magee's finest accomplishments in the text is the way he interweaves Locke, Berkeley, Hume, and Kant into Schopenhauer's thought in order to demonstrate that Schopenhauer truly represents the direction to which we must look for further progress in understanding this incredible mystery in which we live. This is the single best secondary treatment of Schopenhauer on the market, period, and is also one of the best books I have ever read.