With the publication of Parerga and Paralipomena in 1851, there finally came some measure of the fame that Schopenhauer thought was his due. Described by Schopenhauer himself as 'incomparably more popular than everything up till now', Parerga is a miscellany of essays addressing themes that complement his work The World as Will and Representation, along with more divergent, speculative pieces. It includes essays on method, logic, the intellect, Kant, pantheism, natural science, religion, education, and language. The present volume offers a new translation, a substantial introduction explaining the context of the essays, and extensive editorial notes on the different published versions of the work. This readable and scholarly edition will be an essential reference for those studying Schopenhauer, the history of philosophy, and nineteenth-century German philosophy.

Author Biography

Adrian Del Caro is Distinguished Professor of Humanities and Head of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures at the University of Tennessee. He has published many books, including The Early Poetry of Paul Celan: In the Beginning Was the Word (1997) and Grounding the Nietzsche Rhetoric of Earth (2004). He has published numerous articles in journals including Journal of the History of Ideas, Philosophy and Literature, and German Studies Review. His translations include poetry for The German Mind of the Nineteenth Century (edited by Hermann Glaser, 1981) and The Gay Science (edited by Bernard Williams, Cambridge, 2001). Christopher Janaway is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton. His most recent books include Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction (2002) and Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's Genealogy (2007). His most recently edited collections include The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (Cambridge, 2000) and Better Consciousness: Schopenhauer's Philosophy of Value (co-edited with Alex Neill, 2009). He is General Editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer series, for which he has translated The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (Cambridge, 2009) and co-translated three other volumes.