David Bather Woods, "Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy's Greatest Pessimist" (U Chicago Press, 2025)

Mar 23, 2026

David Bather Woods, associate professor at Warwick and Schopenhauer scholar, discusses his new philosophical biography. He explores Schopenhauer’s life, tone, and how pessimism coexists with compassion. Conversations touch on influence on artists, the porcupine parable, boredom versus suffering, suicide and madness, sex and gender, and why Schopenhauer still matters today.

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ANECDOTE

How Schopenhauer Hooked a Young Philosopher

David Bather Woods discovered Schopenhauer as a teenager via The Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will and it hooked his philosophical career.
He wrote his undergraduate dissertation and PhD on Schopenhauer, which led to this book decades later.

INSIGHT

Philosophical Biography Framed By Everyday Themes

The book is a concise philosophical biography organized around worldly topics like love, death, gender, and fame rather than a dense metaphysical treatise.
Woods uses life events to illuminate Schopenhauer's ideas and asks whether Schopenhauer lived well by his own pessimistic standards.

INSIGHT

Compassion Softens Schopenhauer's Pessimism

Schopenhauer's pessimism is tempered by compassion, which he grounds as the basis of ethics: treat others' suffering as your own.
This ethic explains his advocacy for animal rights and his personal affection for his poodles.

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Arthur Schopenhauer: The Life and Thought of Philosophy’s Greatest Pessimist by David Bather Woods

An engaging biography of one of the most influential Western philosophers and a thought-provoking exploration of how to live with Arthur Schopenhauer’s pessimism.
Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) almost wasn’t one of the greatest philosophers of the nineteenth century. Born in the Free City of Danzig to a family of shipping merchants, he was destined for a life of imports and exports until his father died in a suspected suicide. After much deliberation, the young Schopenhauer invested his inheritance in himself and his philosophical vocation. But the long road to recognition was a difficult one, with Schopenhauer spending all but the last decade of his life in total obscurity. Yet his ideas and style went on to influence great thinkers, including Friedrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Sigmund Freud, as well as artists such as the composer Richard Wagner and writers Marcel Proust, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett, and many more.
A singular and remarkably influential thinker, Schopenhauer is usually described as an extreme pessimist. He questioned the purpose of existence in a world where pain and suffering are inescapable and happiness is all too brief. In this engaging philosophical biography, David Bather Woods reevaluates Schopenhauer’s pessimism in the context of his life experiences, revealing the philosopher’s relentless fascination with the world and making a case for his contemporary relevance. Bather Woods weaves together Schopenhauer’s ideas with the story of how he came to be, including such topics as love, loneliness, morality, politics, gender, sexuality, death, suicide, fame, and madness. In doing so, this book answers some of life’s most challenging questions about how to deal with pain and loss, and how to live with ourselves and each other.
Despite his pessimistic outlook on human existence, Schopenhauer didn’t give up on life. Rather, he recognized that the question of how to live becomes even more pressing, and he worked to provide an answer. Bather Woods shows how Schopenhauer’s life informed his ideas and how they still resonate today.

David Bather Woods is associate professor of philosophy at the University of Warwick. He is coeditor with Timothy Stoll of The Schopenhauerian Mind. He has contributed chapters to The Proustian Mind, Schopenhauer’s Moral Philosophy, and The Palgrave Schopenhauer Handbook.

Morteza Hajizadeh is a Ph.D. graduate in English from the University of Auckland in New Zealand. His research interests are Cultural Studies; Critical Theory; Environmental History; Medieval (Intellectual) History; Gothic Studies; 18th and 19th Century British Literature.

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