Abstract

Schopenhauer, perhaps more than any other Western philosopher, has been associated with Asian, and specifically Indian philosophy. The problem in the last hundred years of commentarial literature has been assessing what his relationship to pre-systematic Indian philosophical thought was. Both European and Indian scholars have vacillated over the years from great confidence that Schopenhauer's system was inspired by and even representative of classical Indian thought to a concurrence that Schopenhauer's knowledge of pre-systematic Hinduism and Buddhism was superficial and his invoking of their ideas was meant to reflect ideas that were strictly his own. This dissertation will establish that, while Schopenhauer did treat some aspects of pre-systematic Hindu and Buddhist thought superficially, he did appropriate the Upanis&dotbelow;dic notion of maya into his epistemology as a thesis of falsification, and this had great effects on his metaphysics of will and ethics of identification and compassion in the argumentation of his system. ;To this end, this dissertation will first examine the criteria of influence which have been used by the last hundred years of scholars in assessing Schopenhauer's relationship to pre-systematic Hindu and Buddhist philosophy, suggest that the criteria are inadequate as measures of influence, and formulate minimum and more reliable criteria. Next, Schopenhauer's first acquaintance with Anquetil Duperron's translations of the Upanis&dotbelow;ads during the formulation of his system in his notebooks from 1814 to 1818 will be investigated, in order to show how his developing systematic epistemology, metaphysics and ethics were effected by this encounter. The bulk of the dissertation will then be devoted to a detailed analysis of how crucial Schopenhauer's thesis of falsification, the result of his appropriation of the idea of maya, was for his representation theory, metaphysics of will and ethics of identification. The theory of falsification was indeed a necessary linking concept between the epistemology, metaphysics and ethics which helped give Schopenhauer's system cohesion. Finally, two enduring legacies of Schopenhauer's appropriation of ideas from pre-systematic Indian philosophical thought will be explicated, namely his stigmatizations of the Indian philosophical tradition with the stereotypes of pessimism and irrationalism, and the implications of his philosophical appropriation for cross-cultural philosophy