On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason

by Arthur Schopenhauer

Book Overview

Schopenhauer's analyses of causation and related concepts . . . rival and probably surpass in their depth and brilliance the more celebrated discussions of David Hume. Where Hume grossly oversimplified these problems and left them riddled with paradoxes, Schopenhauer disentangled them and shed light on what had seemed hopelessly dark. --Richard Taylor, University of Rochester

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0875482015
• ISBN13: 9780875482019
• Release Date: January 1999
• Publisher: Open Court
• Length: 320 Pages
• Weight: 0.85 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.6" x 5.9" x 8.9"

Customer Reviews

Minor Problem

This amazing treatise on human knowledge has one little fault. The editors at Open Court left out eleven words in the Tranlator's Introduction. This omission should gratify present-day philosophers in that it turns Schopenhauer's words into modern-sounding nonsense. I will surround the omitted words with parentheses. On page xx, Schopenhauer is quoted: " ...so that I cannot hope ever to find a more correct and accurate expression of that core of my philosophy (than what is there recorded. Whoever wishes to know my philosophy) thoroughly and investigate it seriously must take that chapter into consideration." You see, the occurrence of the word "philosophy" twice in close proximity utterly confused them. I notified Open Court but did not receive an acknowledgement. Other than this, I have to judge this book as one of the few life-changing writings that occur a few times every century. For laughs, read Heidegger's "Principle of Reason" and compare the two.

easy reading

This work is well written, like the rest of Schopenhauer's books, and many of its arguments stand strong today. That the understanding is active in perception, that percpetion is intellectual, is a huge step beyond Kant. Furthermore, Schopenhauer's claim that causality is necessary for sense experience, though not proving the a priori nature of causality as he thought, is strong and holds true whether one is a realist or an idealist. In the case of realism, sense experience is gotten by the affectation of objects upon the body, and in the case of idealism, sense experience is the production of the individual, and thus causality is necessary either way. One may object to Schopenhauer's attempt to rationalize everything down to human action - that he makes the entire phenomenal world deterministic. But he has strong arguments for this as well which are further explained in On the Basis of Morality and On the Freedom of the Will. Schopenhauer is one of the few philosophers I still enjoy reading, and rather than finding gaps in his system... people would do well to learn from him. While this work prepares the way for his whole system, and is essential to understanding particulary Book One and the Appendix on Kant of his magnum opus, this work should make any openminded empirical realist uneasy, though it does not prove the radical kind of Berkeleian idealism to which Schopenhauer subscribed.

Lucid and a bit quaint

It is one of the few injustices of Bertrand RussellÕs ÒHistory of Western Philosophy,Ó that he failed to appreciate SchopenhauerÕs thesis for his doctorate. But it is really one of the seminal documents that conclusively closed a debate which had begun with Descartes and included David Hume and Immanuel Kant. Schopenhauer was very much a no nonsense thinker who felt nothing but contempt for people like Hegel (his bte noir) or Fichte. He also had an open mind for the sciences, yet came a bit too early for Gregor Mendel and Darwin. So Schopenhauer proposed his famous voluntarism, a blind, but all-pervasive will behind the shifting spectre of never ending changes. In this sense Schopenhauer holds a middle position like Tycho Brahe had held between Copernicus and Kepler. It is not science yet, but already departing from the realm of pure thought. There are many ways to understand the meaning of philosophy, but I believe Bertrand Russell had put it best: ÒIs there anything we can think of which, by the mere fact that we can think of it, is shown to exist outside of our thought? If yes is the right answer, there is a bridge from pure thought to things, if not, not.Ó SchopenhauerÕs answer to this question is fourfold, i.e. his exposition of the Òprinciple of sufficient reason,Ó and it is as good an answer, as anybody possibly could give, who puts himself under the constrains of BerkeleyÕs idealism. It is not only the epistemological core to SchopenhauerÕs own philosophy, it really takes the fundamentals through the paces and answers to David HumeÕs demolition of causality. In essence it says, that causality is a common bias in human and animal sensibility, which Ôa prioryÕ enables us to operate on our empirical sensations. It is the way how we structure the world, but not necessarily a feature of the empirical phenomena under scrutiny as Hume had already had observed. Then why does a sensibility based on the concept of causality operates so efficiently? Schopenhauer is still a classical rationalist of the old school. Like his master, Immanuel Kant, instead of postulating a convenient set of inborn instincts or acquired intuitions, he prefers the premise, that there is a LOGICAL reason, a preconceived NECESSITY, for the way we slot and pigeonhole perceptions and employ our operative ideas. So how does this work in the real world? In essence Schopenhauer takes ÒperceptionÓ not to be the product of sensation, but of understanding. In other words what our senses present to our cognition is transformed by the 4 linchpins of common sense: causation, plausibility, geometry, and psychological motivation. So there is a chain of mental events: sensation is converted by an act of recognition to perception. From this it is only one logical step further to SchopenhauerÕs first premise of his mature philosophy that the world is Òmy will and representation,Ó because the Òobjective worldÓ which we naively take to be given to our senses is in fact a transformati

Essential Reading.

This work is amazingly still ahead of its time despite being roughly 150 years old. It is essential for any student of science and/or philosophy. It requires focus and energy to read, and rather bogs down toward the end, but upon finishing it you'll most likely be enlightened on aspects of your cognitive and reasoning powers you weren't previously aware you even possessed. Here's why this book is important. The history of humanity's awakening from animal consciousness into the self-aware, abstract reasoning existence marks a movement from the the evolutionary advent of vertebrates to interstellar space probes. It's quite a little drama. The chroniclers of this story weren't really able to swing into action, due to technical difficulties, until a crotchety old cuss from Konigsberg ran off the barbarians of the mind. Kant is not refered to as the father of the modern scientific method for nothing. What Kant attributes to Hume in terms of motivation is also given to Kant on the road to Schopenhauer. Schopenhauer takes up the torch mightily and ushers us finally onto the platform of the empirical epistemology of idealism, which seems like a contradiction but isn't. It is astounding how many supposedly scientific types still do not grasp the necessary idealism ingrained in the neural cognitive machinery and see the human animal as machines of sensation. Whatever graduation requirements in American universities stand responsible for this travesty are dispelled by the concise and unwavering interpretation of Schopenhauer. Read it. Learn from it. The principle of sufficient reason is of course the necessity that all events derive from their concomitant causes, or, that things happen for a reason. Schopenhauer asigns his (arbitrary) classifictions in a workman like manner and demonstrates a means by which a priori knowledge of causation occurs. Other than elucidating the elemental role idealism plays in the human mind's functioning, the main thrust of this book is to put the final nail in Kant's refutation of Hume's denial of causation in an eloquent compliment to what Hume was asking future generations to do; and Schopenhauer rises to the task. Scopenhauer takes from Kant the halter of reality, that marriage of empiricism, cognition, and ratiocination, and leads the old mare firmly into the present. Too bad the present has not worked its way beyond a man dead for over a century. This need not be your fate however. If you have read Kant's 'Critique of Pure Reason' then this book is its logical extension and awaits your company. If not, then head to a cabin high in the Himalayas come winter, read the Critique, then read this book. It'll rock your world.

Fundamental Literature

I am happy to encourage any reader to Schpenhauer's doctoral thesis, just as much as he himself did in the introduction of the World as Will and Representation. The book is absolutely worth the time spent, and it is indeed a coherent prime step (though this is a revised edition of the 1814 original) to Schopenhauer's philosophical system. The translation by E.F.Payne is product of a life's effort. It is almost impecable and will stand to the demands of the accurate reader, though it may be advisable to compare and review the original in order to look for the literary sound of the ideas exposed. Schopenhauer is one of those rare cases where highly expressive prose correlates smoothly with mighty philosophical meaning. He may also be an excellent way to perfect our understanding of Kant.