Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms is a collection of Arthur Schopenhauer’s writings, all done during the first half of the 1800s. Many of the writings are selected from Schopenhauer’s last publication, Parerga and Paralipomena, which was published in 1851. Though his writings were not exceptionally well known during his lifetime, Schopenhauer’s thoughts and writing became much more popular after his time.
Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher who lived in the 1800s. Some of his ideas were related to phenomena in the real world, reaching across multiple fields, from philosophy to literature to science. His writing has influenced much thinking in the more recent world, including writers, from philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche to novelists like George Bernard Shaw to scientists like Albert Einstein.
Schopenhauer: Essays and Aphorisms contains Schopenhauer’s iconic idea that human actions aren’t exactly controlled by fate, nor is it controlled by reason. Instead, Schopenhauer argues that the actions are actually determined by what he calls “will” -- what is sometimes blind and oftentimes irrational. In other pieces, Schopenhauer portrays the decisions that humans face to be far beyond good versus evil, moral versus immoral.
