The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (Oxford World´s Classics New Edition)

• These two important essays show Schopenhauer at his most accessible; they constitute two self-contained and clearly argued contributions to ethical theory, published here in a new translation that aims to preserve Schopenhauer's style within readable modern English.
• The Two Fundamental Problems does not call for the substantial engagement with Kant's philosophy demanded by Schopenhauer's large two-volume magnum opus, The World as Will and Representation. The two essays are relevant to today's ethical debates, especially concerning the nature of motivation, the compatibility of responsibility with free will, and virtue ethics.
• The only paperback edition to publish both essays together.
• Introduction by foremost Schopenhauer scholar Christopher Janaway gives a clear summary of the argument of the essays in the context of Schopenhauer's life and works and the history of ethics in the modern period.
• Includes helpful notes, up-to-date bibliography, and a full index.

'my philosophy is like Thebes with a hundred gates: one can enter from all sides and through each gate arrive at the direct path to the centre'

Schopenhauer's two essays On the Freedom of the Will and On the Basis of Morals form his complete system of ethics. Their doctrines, continuous with those in his major work The World as Will and Representation, are presented here in more accessible, self-contained form. Schopenhauer argues, in uniquely powerful prose, that self-consciousness gives the illusion of freedom and that human actions are determined, but that we rightly feel guilt because our actions issue from our essential individual character. He locates moral value in the virtues of loving kindness and voluntary justice that spring from the fundamental incentive of compassion. Morality's basis is ultimately metaphysical, resting on an intuitive identification of the self with all other striving and suffering beings. These essays, newly translated here with an introduction and notes, contain a critique of Kant's ethics, and advance a position that was in turn the target of criticism by Nietzsche.

Readership: Readers of philosophy, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Kant, ethics and students and scholars in these areas; students of history of ethics, nineteenth-century philosophy, modern German thought and literature, Kant's ethics.