ABSTRACT
Schopenhauer's two works on the history of philosophy are analyzed against the background of, on the one hand, J. G. Herder's historicism and, on the other, conceptions of the history of philosophy as philosophy proper, starting with Kant's call for a “philosophical archeology,” an a priori history of reason, and leading via the work of K. L. Reinhold and J. G. Fichte to G. W. F. Hegel's parallelism of the historical and logical development of philosophical systems. Schopenhauer's own approach finds itself somewhere in the middle. He refuses to assign the history of philosophy a systematic place within philosophy, since he maintains that the essence of philosophy consists in seeking timeless truth. At the same time, he acknowledges that philosophical ideas do develop in time. However, their progress does not happen in a continuous fashion. Rather, it depends on the ingenuity of rare philosophical minds, who grasp the “primordial” philosophical problem of the real and the ideal, a problem that has ultimately been solved by Schopenhauer's own philosophy of the world as will and representation.
