Arthur Schopenhauer (1788 – 1860) is the clearest and most provocative of the post-Kantian German idealists.  He is famous nowadays mostly for being a pessimist, but he was a great deal more than that.  He said that anyone who wanted to learn from him should read everything he wrote, then go back and read it again.  We cannot do that in a single semester, but we shall make a start by reading his major works:  On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason; The World as Will and Representation, Volumes I and II; Prize Essay on the Freedom of the Will; and On the Basis of Morality.  The seminar will begin with a brief synopsis of Kant’s philosophy, since Schopenhauer accepted Kant’s distinction between the thing-in-itself and its appearances, yet had significant disagreements with other aspects of Kantian thought, such as Kant’s ethics.  We will proceed to read Schopenhauer and try to understand him.  We will not consult “scholars” or “experts”; we will just read what Schopenhauer wrote, in the elegant English translations by E.F.J. Payne.