Arthur Schopenhauer

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Arthur himself had to remain in Hamburg for more than a year, yet with more freedom to engage in the arts and sciences.

During the next two years, spent in Gotha and Weimar, he acquired the necessary academic preparation for attendance at a university.

In the fall of 1809 he matriculated as a student of medicine at the University of Göttingen and mainly attended lectures on the natural sciences. As early as his second semester, however, he transferred to the humanities, concentrating first on the study of Plato and Immanuel Kant From 1811 to 1813 he attended the University of Berlin (where he heard such philosophers as J.G. Fichte and Friedrich Schleiermacher, with little appreciation); and in Rudolstadt, during the summer of 1813, he finished his dissertation, which earned him the doctor of philosophy degree from the University of Jena.

The following winter (1813-14) he spent in Weimar, in intimate association with Goethe, with whom he discussed various philosophical topics. ...

His next three years were dedicated exclusively to the preparation and composition of his main work.

... The book marked the summit of Schopenhauer's thought. In the many years thereafter, no further development of his philosophy occurred, no inner struggles or changes, no critical reorganization of basic thoughts. From then onward, his work consisted merely of more detailed exposition, clarification, and affirmation.

In March 1820, after a lengthy first tour of Italy and a triumphant dispute with Hegel, he qualified to lecture at the University of Berlin. Though he remained a member of the university for 24 semesters, only his first lecture was actually held; for he had scheduled ...

He had finally renounced his career as a university professor and lived henceforth as a recluse, totally absorbed in his studies ... and his writings. His life now took on the shape that posterity first came to know: the measured uniformity of the days; the strict, ascetic lifestyle modeled after Kant; the old-fashioned attire; the tendency to gesticulative soliloquy.

In 1836, after 19 years of “silent indignation,” he published his short treatise Über den Willen in der Natur (On the Will in Nature), which skillfully employed the queries and findings of the rapidly expanding natural sciences in support of his theory of the will.

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