Abstract
Schopenhauer positions himself squarely within the tradition of Kant’s transcendental idealism , and his first sense of the metaphysical comprises the synthetic cognition a priori that makes experience possible. This is Schopenhauer’s transcendental metaphysics. As he developed philosophically however, Schopenhauer devised a second sense of the metaphysical. This second sense also depends, albeit negatively, on transcendental idealism because its central claim—that the thing in itself should be identified with will—looks like precisely a species of transcendent metaphysics, a claim that goes beyond the possibility of experience into the cognitively forbidden realm of things in themselves. I shall argue however that this second sense of the metaphysical can be formulated much more independently of transcendental idealism , following a recent similar interpretation of Kant due to Rae Langton, and that this makes for some surprising connections to contemporary metaphysics.
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Welchman, A. (2017). Schopenhauer’s Two Metaphysics: Transcendental and Transcendent. In: Shapshay, S. (eds) The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook. Palgrave Handbooks in German Idealism. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62947-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-62947-6_7
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