Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy

The appearance of Kant's critiques resulted very swiftly in what some thought a series of contradictions, as in the famous problem of double affection. The swiftly moving stream passes via Fichte to Hegel as the core distinction of the noumenal and phenomenal is factored into a nearly opposite result. As if standing by to watch this current and respond with a gesture of the original vision, Schopenhauer with brilliant insight attempts to assess these reactions with a streamlined recursion of the Kantian perspective. Janaway's cogent summary and critique is surprising in its acumen, and a trifle cold in its assessement of Schopenhauer's quirky yet solid version of 'transcendental idealism'. But then the fan of Schopenhauer tends to linger in a vision whose logical complexities are actually well served by this unsentimental analysis. One is put to work on the strange paradoxes of self and appearance in the context of one who braves these dangerous waters that later analytical philosophy would be so determined to rid us of. Schopenhauer's corpus is either ignored or made into a belief system, here we see a way via critique that it might be exercised to its limits and understood, unless the severity of the analyis of what is always a brittle philosophy pointing to a deeper noumenal reality is taken as some final reduction of the 'fallacy' of the whole endeavor. The irony is that Kant and Schopenhauer always seem to survive their critics, here they are both, I should think, well served by one such.Challenging work for anyone alert to this irascible campanion of the great period of German philosophy.