SCHOPENHAUER, Arthur.

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Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, behandelt in zwei akademischen Preisschriften. First edition of the German philosopher's best and most focussed work on ethics, outlining stinging attacks on both Kant and Hegel.In 1839, Schopenhauer wrote an essay titled On the Freedom of Human Will, which won him the gold medal from the Royal Norwegian Society of Sciences. Buoyed, he wrote a complementary essay one year later, On the Foundations of Morality, which did not fare as well. Although this was the only submission to a competition run by the Royal Danish Society, it was rejected on the grounds that it was opinionated and brutally disrespectful to prominent philosophers - Hegel in particular. Schopenhauer responded by publishing the two papers as Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (original German - Die Beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik), with a lengthy preface outlining some choice thoughts on both Hegel and the Royal Danish Society. Although the Two Fundamental Problems carries an 1841 date, it was published late in 1840.This volume also includes the second edition of On the Will in Nature (original German - Ueber den Willen in der Natur), originally published in 1836, which aims to bring recent developments in 19th-century science in line with Schopenhauer's nascent theory of the will. By 1854, his intellectual isolation had begun to abate and, as he confidently wrote in the preface to the second edition, "legor et legar" ("I am read and I will be read" - p. vi).

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