Philosophy’s greatest pessimist wasn’t so miserable after all
According to the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860), people prefer reading books about great thinkers rather than by the thinkers themselves because ‘like is attracted to like and the shallow, tasteless gossip of a contemporary pinhead is more agreeable and convenient to them than the thoughts of great minds’. Thankfully, this contemptuous attitude towards biographers has not deterred David Bather Woods, a professor at Warwick University, from taking a fresh look at one of the most influential yet misunderstood figures in western philosophy. Woods’s prose is clear and compelling, though the book’s thematic structure is confusing. He argues that the defining event in Schopenhauer’s life was the suspected suicide of
