Abstract

Shows what Schopenhauer's view was of his own place in the history of philosophy, as revealed by an unusually long synopsis he wrote for such a history. He counted two philosophers, Plato and Kant, as supreme and regarded himself as correcting and completing the work of Kant. The foundations of Kant's critical philosophy had been laid, he believed, by Locke, and then strengthened by Hume. So he saw Locke, Hume, Kant, and himself as having developed a single line of thought over nearly 200 years. However, this was because they all stood baffled before the same fundamental problems: he disparaged any approach to philosophy that was primarily concerned with the writings of other philosophers and not directly with the problems presented to us by the world.