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 of Philosophy and Schopenhauer scholar, discusses his new biography of Arthur Schopenhauer. He explores Schopenhauer’s worldly concerns like love, fame, boredom, suicide, and mental illness. The conversation traces Schopenhauer’s influence on artists and thinkers and highlights compassion, humor, and why his pessimism still resonates today.

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INSIGHT

Philosophical Biography Framed By Everyday Topics

Woods frames his biography around worldly topics like love, loneliness, suicide and fame rather than only treating Schopenhauer as a grand metaphysician.
This topical structure links life events to philosophical claims and reframes the question: did Schopenhauer live well by his own standards?

INSIGHT

Compassion Balances Schopenhauer's Pessimism

Schopenhauer pairs bleak diagnoses about suffering with compassion as the ethical core, making his pessimism more tolerable.
He championed animal protection and famously loved his poodles, reflecting compassion in both theory and life.

ANECDOTE

Schopenhauer's Porcupines And The Misread Moral

Schopenhauer's Porcupines fable shows social proximity causing mutual harm until a balance is found.
Woods argues Schopenhauer misreads the moral, favoring self-reliant withdrawal (the warm porcupine) over the broader social conundrum.

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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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