ABSTRACT
This chapter sketches out the contours of the aftermath of Kantian philosophy, discusses the potential influence of Indian thought on Schopenhauer and summarizes some of the elements of Kant's philosophy that organically lead towards Schopenhauer's philosophy. While Schopenhauer would argue against the special intellectual intuition advanced by Schelling, Fichte and Jacobi, he will develop a similar special faculty, namely immediate intuition of themselves as will, that will allow for a positive characterization of the noumenon. Kant and Schopenhauer are faced with a similar difficulty: the phenomenal, natural self is vehemently opposed to subjecting itself to noumenal freedom. Schopenhauer matured at a time when philosophy was trying to find its proper bearings from the revolutionary impact of Kant's transcendental idealism. Most of the successors built upon Kant's architectonic rationality and completed the system of reason Kant never finished. In the monograph, attention will be given mostly to the Kantian pedigree of Schopenhauer's philosophy.
