The World as Will and Representation

Marked the pinnacle of Schopenhauer’s philosophical thought; he spent the rest of his life refining, clarifying, and deepening the ideas presented in this work without any fundamental changes.

The first edition was met with near universal silence. The second edition of 1844 similarly failed to attract any interest. At the time, post-Kantian German academic philosophy was dominated by the German Idealists—foremost among them G. W. F. Hegel, whom Schopenhauer bitterly denounced as a ‘charlatan’.

It was not until the publication of his Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851 that Schopenhauer began to see the start of the recognition that eluded him for so long.