Gardner, S; (2016) Schopenhauer's Metaphilosophy: How to Think a World Without Reason. In: Head, J and Vanden Auweele, D, (eds.) Schopenhauer’s Fourfold Root. (pp. 11-31). Routledge: London, UK.

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Abstract

I suggested in a previous paper that Schopenhauer’s decision to focus his doctoral dissertation on the principle of sufficient reason owes a great deal to his opposition to Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel. The thesis concerning the limits of thought advanced in Fourfold Root, though effective in undermining the speculative idealism of his post-Kantian contemporaries, is however both problematic on its own account and directly responsible for well-known difficulties facing Schopenhauer’s metaphysics of will. The relation of Fourfold Root to The World as Will and Representation is thus ambiguous, for while it prepares the way for Schopenhauer’s reinstatement of Kant’s transcendental idealism as he understands it, it at the same time obstructs a literal metaphysical reading of his identification of world with Wille. In response I offer, first, an account of the historical context that helps to make sense of Schopenhauer’s metaphilosophical decisions, and second, a construal of Schopenhauer’s metaphilosophy designed to protect his claim to offer a coherent alternative to rationalist forms of post-Kantian idealism (though not his claim to have undermined or surpassed them).

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