Bibliographic record
Abstract
LEWIS, Peter B. Arthur Schopenhauer. London: Reaktion Books Ltd., 2012. 187pp. Paper, $16.95--Of the biographies of Schopenhauer available in English, two full-length works dominate the contemporary landscape: David E. Cartwright's monumental Schopenhauer: A Biography and Rudiger Safranski's Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy. More condensed renditions of Schopenhauer's life appeared in the 1930's and before, such as Vivian J. McGill's Schopenhauer: Pessimist and Pagan, William Wallace's Life of Arthur Schopenhauer and Helen Zimmern's Arthur Schopenhauer: His Life and Philosophy. Inspired specifically by Wallace's book, Peter B. Lewis's Arthur Schopenhauer is a succinct and accessible biography intended for the educated general public. Lewis's presentation selects well the salient and influential episodes in Schopenhauer's life, organizing them into eight, nicely balanced chapters that carry us through Schopenhauer's seventy-two years. The book also contains revealing illustrations, twenty-seven in total, that allow readers to appreciate the physical resemblance between Schopenhauer and his mother, not to mention the handsome quality of his mother's companion, Georg Friedrich Muller von Gerstenbergk, whose presence precipitated the awful breakdown of Schopenhauer's relationship with his mother. Among the noteworthy facts that Lewis assembles, he mentions that upon the death of Schopenhauer's father, a merchant and shipowner, Schopenhauer's inheritance was substantial enough to produce an annual interest twice the amount of a university professor's typical salary. At college, Schopenhauer's friends included William Backhouse Astor, son of John Jacob Astor, the American millionaire. During his three-decade residence in Frankfurt in later years, he dined daily at a fine hotel restaurant at Frankfurt's city center, the Englisher Hof. Lewis punctuates his biography with observations about Schopenhauer's psychology, presenting him as someone who suffered feelings of abandonment by his parents, who experienced chronic anxiety, whose attitude toward women was poisoned by his relationship with his mother, whose love affairs were frustrated and marked sadly by the deaths of two infants, and whose dealings with other people were often fraught with conflict. Loving animals more than his fellow human beings, Schopenhauer emerges as someone who could not live the philosophy of life that he articulated. Omitted is how with his secure financial situation and accompanying freedom, Schopenhauer deserves respect for having focused his life on philosophical writing, and for having lived an intellectually-oriented, materially modest, relatively ascetic life. The solid selection and accessible rendition of the facts surrounding Schopenhauer's life notwithstanding, Lewis casts doubt upon Schopenhauer's philosophy as the expression of a psychologically idiosyncratic mind, assuming questionably that the structure of reality must coincide with, or be revealed best by, the personality of a normally adjusted individual. …
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.005 | 0.005 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.002 | 0.003 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.071 | 0.064 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".