Abstract

The neglect of Schopenhauer's philosophy in the twentieth century led to his becoming associated in people's minds with his neat‐contemporaries, the Idealist philosophers Fichte, Schelling, and Hegel, when in fact he was a radically different sort of philosopher from them. Unlike them, he absorbed the empiricist tradition into his work and saw the enterprise on which he was engaged as having been launched by Locke. He hated the Idealists and their writings, regarding them as a poisonous influence. In this he went too far, for their work had merits that he failed to appreciate and more in common with his own than he realized.