Talk:Arthur Schopenhauer/Archive 1

message: http://ecis2002.univ.gda.pl/ecis2002.html?s=magic2
They surrendered only after the king, seeing the hopeless situation, freed them from their obligation of allegiance and left the city. After the 1st partition of Poland, in which the Prussian seized the surroundings of Gdañsk, Joanna Schopenhauer, mother of the philosopher, wrote: "At this morning calamity has fallen like vampyre on my native city, deemed to disaster, and sucked its marrow for long years till the ultimate dilapidation".
http://4.1911encyclopedia.org/S/SC/SCHOPENHAUER_ARTHUR.htm
His father, Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer, the youngest of a family to which the mother had brought the germs of mental malady, was a man of strong will and originality, and so proud of the independence of his native town that when Danzig in 1793 surrendered to the Prussians he and his whole establishment withdrew to Hamburg~ Cautious 13:47, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title: Partitions

message: You know, now we have three portraits of Schopenhauer: the original drawing, the painting, and the old engraving that I put on my user page in order to have something to do with it.  I know he was such a handsome devil and all, but I'm not sure we need quite so many. --  Smerdis of Tlön 15:00, 2 Apr 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Portraits of Schopenhauer 

message: An automated Wikipedia link suggester has some possible wiki link suggestions for the Arthur_Schopenhauer article:
* Can link conscious mind: ...  They arise prior to reflection.  They arise even when the conscious mind would prefer to hold them at bay.  The rational mind is for... (link to section)
* Can link bad art: ...ror for which most forms of entertainment — including bad art — only provided a distraction.  A wide range of autho... (link to section)
* Can link political affairs: ...tes prideful boasts of how little attention he had paid "to political affairs of [his] day".  In a life that spanned several revolutions ... (link to section)
* Can link church and state: ...ifiable content.  He also thought that his glorification of church and state were designed for personal advantage and had little to do w... (link to section)
* Can link heroism: ... of the Idols]] is often quoted: *He has interpreted art, heroism, genius, beauty, great sympathy, knowledge, the will to tru... (link to section)
* Can link Eastern religions: ...]] has the same "inner-kernal" [as he puts it] as those two Eastern religions in teaching the impermanence of all world pleasures and the... (link to section)
* Can link University of Chicago: ... Modernism and Music: An Anthology of Sources, p.39n34. University of Chicago Press. ISBN 0226012670.... (link to section)
Additionally, there are some other articles which may be able to linked to this one (also known as "backlinks"):
* In Wolfgang Schirmacher, can backlink Arthur Schopenhauer: ...a, 1995, 387 pages, Paperback, ISBN 3851650239.   (editor): Arthur Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer: Philosophical Writings. The...
Notes: The article text has not been changed in any way; Some of these suggestions may be wrong, some may be right.
Feedback: I like it, I hate it, Please don't link to — LinkBot 11:33, 1 Dec 2004 (UTC)
thread_title:  Suggest 7 possible wiki links and 1 possible backlink for [[Arthur Schopenhauer]]. 

message: There seem to be a few points of dispute on this page: (1) Schopenhauer's nationality, (2) The name of his birthplace, (3) The ethnic mix of his birthplace. As with most disputes, if there is a controversy, it should be mentioned on the article page. 
# Pretty much all references call him a German Philosopher, including encyclopedia britannica and the polish wikipedia. 
# I am OK with calling it GDansk, if Danzig is also mentined in brackets or so. Danzig is still commonly used in English, this would help people googling for topics related to Danzig. Also, at that time the city was commonly known under that name. 
# The City seems to have a large german population at that time, of which Schopenhauer was most likely a part of. This should be mentioned in the article, maybe not necessarily in the intro paragraph, but maybe in the Life section. This would be helpful for other users to understand where Schopenhauer came from. 
I hope this compromise attempt gets somehwere. We can't go on reverting each other forever -- Chris 73 Talk 00:49, Feb 1, 2005 (UTC)
:Addon: Actually, it seems his ethnic heritage was Dutch ( and ). That can also be added. -- Chris 73 Talk 01:16, Feb 1, 2005 (UTC)
:::::OK, i see that a compromise with you is not possible (and i dont really wonder, since your comments on user:H.J. talk page User_talk:24.7.179.169/Archive, your support of her and now of Sca). We should go back to the version with Polish-born--Emax 01:00, Feb 1, 2005 (UTC)
::My preference would be that the city name be Danzig, everywhere, largely because this is also the English name of the city, contains no characters untypeable on a standard English language keyboard, and creates fewer pronunciation issues than Gdansk.  The trouble would appear to arise with Polish nationalists, who are eager to impose their spelling.  Besides, by rights the whole Baltic coastline should belong to Sweden anyways.  Schopenhauer's works suggest that he read English, French, Spanish, and Latin; they give no evidence that he read Polish, but then again I'm not sure that there was a great deal of Polish literature in print in the early 19th century.  Still, it warms my heart that regard for Schopenhauer is so high that folks are eager to claim him for their ethnic group; for too long his philosophy was out of fashion.  I don't care deeply enough about tribal politics to resist one way or another -- Smerdis of Tlön 15:37, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Compromise attempt

message: Let me suggest a modest solution to this entire unfortunate and disturbing imbroglio:  Let's retroactively  declare Schopenhauer to have been a "Prussian philosopher."  Poles could take heart in this terminology by thinking of Royal Prussia, while Germans could heave a sigh of relief by reflecting upon Prussia's German ethos. This solution has the added virtue of classifying him as a member of an entity that hasn't existed for some time, and from which there can be no futher expressions of vox populi, since the Prussians strictly speaking are all dead.
That Schopenhauer himself may have had little love for Prussianism as it later came to be understood, and was not an ethnic nationalist, seems to me irrelevant to this discussion. Indeed, who cares about his stodgy old philosophy anyway?  What's important on Wikipedia is that everyone's prejudices, preconceptions and deeply embraced half-truths be pandered to in some way. If the result is confusing to the casual user attempting to obtain "knowledge," so what?  Let him consult Britannica and a historical atlas.
I trust this meets with everyone's approval and accept your thanks in advance.
Sca 19:57, 2 Feb 2005 (UTC)
replies: text: Everybody, please calm down. I would like to try to solve this dispute by discussion, not by hurling sarcasms at each other. As for another attempt at a compromise: All references I checked (including the polish Wikipedia) either refer to him as German, or do not list his nationality. I think it is safe to say that he is indeed German. If there is a dispute about it, then we could also add this to the article, i.e. ... although some see him as Prussian philosopher... or something to that respect (but that would need a reference).  I think the bigger problem is the Danzig/Gdansk mentioning, and to which country it belonged to at that time. Most English language references list his birthplace as Danzig, with Gdansk in brackets, I have not yet seen an English reference that mentions only Gdansk and not Danzig. A compromise would probably include both, possibly with a brief detailed explanation of the city having a German majority and being a rather independent part of Poland. I am pretty much open to include all viewpoints as long as there is a credible English language reference for it (i.e. no blog or newsgroup). -- Chris 73 Talk 03:30, Feb 3, 2005 (UTC)
----
I was just kidding about Schopenhauer having been a "Prussian" philosopher. He was German. As to your other suggestions, that would be even-handed, down the middle, balanced, i.e. truthful.
Sca 17:18, 3 Feb 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: More compromise attempts 

message: Hello, I'm confused about the reference to Heraclitus' assertion that everything is made of fire, because I remember a similar assertion made by Thales, whereby everything was made of water. Perhaps Thales' statement was mistaken for Heraclitus'.  - -_-
:The article on Heraclitus says:  "He disagreed with Thales, Anaximander, and Pythagoras about the nature of the ultimate substance and claimed instead that everything is derived from the Greek classical element fire, rather than from air, water, or earth."  FWIW, Bryan Magee prefers to restate Schopenhauer's belief that the world is Will in terms of a belief that energy is the fundamental substance: in which case it could be argued that Heraclitus beat him to the punch by a couple millennia.  Smerdis of Tlön 15:02, 19 Jun 2005 (UTC)
thread_title: Heraclitus

message: Buried somewhere above in all that Gdansk talk is the comment that Schopenhauer didn't follow his own morality; that he advocated asceticism but was a voluptuous bon vivant. Well. Schopenhauer answered that objection 185 years ago. In WWR I, § 68, he wrote: "...it is a strange demand on a moralist that he should commend no other virtue than that which he himself possesses."
152.163.101.14 23:14, 10 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Immoral Moralist 

message: Chris73, do you mind explaining and giving a reason for deleting my two edits in which I:
* gave the Marquet lawsuit its own paragraph, and
* quoted the pessimist Schopenhauer's proof that this is the worst of all possible worlds?
152.163.101.14 17:17, 14 September 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Arbitrary Reverts? 

message: A good example that proves Schopenhauer's theory of the ludicrous can be seen at The Aristocrats.152.163.101.14 22:29, 20 October 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Laughter 

message: To get a taste of where many "intellectuals" learned their Kant, see Schopenhauer's criticism of the Kantian philosophy. Schopenhauer's essay was more easily read than Kant's original books.152.163.101.14 17:19, 10 November 2005 (UTC)
thread_title:  Critique of Kant