The rare first edition of Schopenhauer’s first book, On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason, the published version of his doctoral thesis submitted at the University of Jena earlier in the same year. Schopenhauer considered his dissertation to be essential to understanding his wider philosophical system, in particular for providing the epistemic foundations for his masterpiece The World as Will and Representation (1818/19).
Schopenhauer’s dissertation is primarily concerned with the principle of sufficient reason, which denotes the proposition that there can be no fact or truth that lacks a sufficient reason why it should be so, and not otherwise. For everything that is, there must be a reason why it is so. Building on the principle of sufficient reason as elaborated by Leibniz in his Monadology (1714), and taking inspiration from Aristotle’s doctrine of four basic kinds of explanatory reason, Schopenhauer proposed four independent classes of objects that always already occur in relation to a knowing subject: Becoming, Knowing, Being, and Willing.
Schopenhauer would frequently cite his dissertation in his later works and insisted on its centrality to his philosophy. Indeed, in the first edition of The World as Will and Representation (1818/19), Schopenhauer referred to his dissertation throughout as “the introductory essay” to his main work, and even went as far as demanding: “… that the introduction be read before the book itself, even though it is not located inside the book but rather appeared five years earlier. … It is absolutely impossible to truly understand the present work unless the reader is familiar with this introduction and propadeutic, and the contents of that essay are presupposed here as much as if they had been included in the book” (The World as Will and Representation, Vol. 1, The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer, 2010, p. 7).
Schopenhauer would go on to later produce a revised and expanded second edition of On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason in 1847, further underscoring its importance within his body work.
Hübscher, Schopenhauer-Bibliographie, 1.
