Guay, Robert. Review of Robert Wicks' SCHOPENHAUER. NDPR (January 2009).

Wicks, Robert. Schopenhauer. Oxford: Blackwell, 2008. After a brief but informative biographical chapter, Wicks has a historical narrative meant to explain how Schopenhauer arrived at the metaphysical views that underlie his ethics. The story begins with Locke, and proceeds roughly as follows: Locke's theory of perception helps to explain "how we can become aware of an objective, public world that . . . contains only qualities associated with space and solidity" (17), but generates a 'veil of ideas' skepticism. This is further aggravated by Humean skepticism about causality, which Wicks renders as the claim that events "are in themselves loose and separate" (23). All this jeopardizes the legitimacy of scientific thinking until Kant's theory of perception recharacterizes causal connections as expressing "logical projections that reflect our rational nature" (25). This succeeds in vindicating scientific inquiry, but the resulting idealism makes knowledge of reality as it is in itself impossible. Schopenhauer then borrows this basic outlook, but transforms it "to allow for knowledge of the thing-in-itself" (28). This transformation involves distinguishing the "world as representation, which is the very product of the PSR [Principle of Sufficient Reason]" (60), from the world as Will, a "blind, irrational, meaningless, and aimless striving" (59) that is the essential reality underlying the illusory world of experience. And once one understands that Will is the metaphysical core of the world, then one arrives, through empathy and asceticism, at an appropriately detached attitude toward worldly desires. . . . Read the rest here: http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=14945.