Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint
Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime

This book offers a new way of approaching Schopenhauer by investigating the links between his philosophical practice and his aesthetics.

Sophia Vasalou (Author)

9781107570252, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 28 April 2016

246 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 1.3 cm, 0.34 kg

'Arthur Schopenhauer considered the drive to philosophize as an expression of a form of wonder provoked by the ubiquity of suffering and death. In Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint, Sophia Vasalou looks carefully at Schopenhauer's philosophic practice and the visionary qualities of his works, arguing that his practice is best understood as an aesthetic one, closely aligned with the experience of the sublime. She artfully engages Schopenhauer's philosophic writings and the Anglophone literature relevant to her topics, and brings a fresh and welcome voice to Schopenhauer studies in a philosophically evocative way.' David Cartwright, University of Wisconsin, Whitewater

With its pessimistic vision and bleak message of world-denial, it has often been difficult to know how to engage with Schopenhauer's philosophy. Schopenhauer's arguments have seemed flawed and his doctrines marred by inconsistencies; his very pessimism almost too flamboyant to be believable. Yet a way of redrawing this engagement stands open, Sophia Vasalou argues, if we attend more closely to the visionary power of Schopenhauer's work. The aim of this book is to place the aesthetic character of Schopenhauer's standpoint at the heart of the way we read his philosophy and the way we answer the question: why read Schopenhauer - and how? Approaching his philosophy as an enactment of the sublime with a longer history in the ancient philosophical tradition, Vasalou provides a fresh way of assessing Schopenhauer's relevance in critical terms. This book will be valuable for students and scholars with an interest in post-Kantian philosophy and ancient ethics.

Introduction
1. A riddle and its answer
2. Philosophy as: aesthetic
3. Philosophy as: sublime
4. Reading Schopenhauer
5. From aesthetics to ethics
6. An ethics of re-descent?

Subject Areas: Ethics & moral philosophy [HPQ], Philosophy: aesthetics [HPN], History of Western philosophy [HPC], Philosophy [HP]