Abstract
The ‘Platonic Ideas’ in Schopenhauer’s metaphysics are (merely) appearances. On the other hand, as the immediate objecthood of the will, they are the essences of species and the only object of true aesthetic cognition, which leads beyond mere appearance. To explain this apparent incongruence, I offer an analysis of Schopenhauer’s early metaphysics (1809–1814), and its transformation into the metaphysics of will, fleshing out the several and divergent concepts of (Platonic) ‘idea’. Specifically, first, as part of his religious and neo-Platonic early philosophy; second, in the context of his ‘true criticism’ in the spirit of Kantian transcendental philosophy; third, as identical to the thing in itself as part of the metaphysics of will, heavily influenced by Kant’s notion(s) of ideas from CR and CJ. Explaining Schopenhauer’s mature notion of Platonic Ideas genetically as a set of homonymic notions helps us better explain its divergent meanings in WWR.
Funding source: Alexander von Humboldt-Stiftung
Acknowledgment
I would like to thank Sandra Shapshay, Alessandro Novembre, and Christopher Janaway for their critical comments on an earlier version of this paper.
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Articles in the same Issue
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- Transcendental Arguments and the Sources of Value: Constitutivism as Critical Realism
- On Natural and Transcendental Illusions in a Kantian-Pragmatist Philosophical Anthropology
- Kantian vs. Platonic: The Ambiguity of Schopenhauer’s Notion of Ideas Explained via Its Origins
- The Nature and Status of Concepts in Phenomenology
- Psychophysiological Transcendentalism in Friedrich Albert Lange’s Social and Political Philosophy
- Book Reviews
- Brandon C. Look.: Leibniz and Kant
- Matthew Rukgaber, Space, Time, and the Origins of Transcendental Idealism: Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy from 1747 to 1770
- Peter Antich, Motivation and the Primacy of Perception: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Knowledge, Athens OH: Ohio UP, 2021, pp. 264, ISBN 978-0-8214-2432-2 (hbk) $95.00.
Articles in the same Issue
- Frontmatter
- Research Articles
- Transcendental Arguments and the Sources of Value: Constitutivism as Critical Realism
- On Natural and Transcendental Illusions in a Kantian-Pragmatist Philosophical Anthropology
- Kantian vs. Platonic: The Ambiguity of Schopenhauer’s Notion of Ideas Explained via Its Origins
- The Nature and Status of Concepts in Phenomenology
- Psychophysiological Transcendentalism in Friedrich Albert Lange’s Social and Political Philosophy
- Book Reviews
- Brandon C. Look.: Leibniz and Kant
- Matthew Rukgaber, Space, Time, and the Origins of Transcendental Idealism: Immanuel Kant’s Philosophy from 1747 to 1770
- Peter Antich, Motivation and the Primacy of Perception: Merleau-Ponty’s Phenomenology of Knowledge, Athens OH: Ohio UP, 2021, pp. 264, ISBN 978-0-8214-2432-2 (hbk) $95.00.