Abstract

In this essay, I focus exclusively on an ill-understood Schopenhauerian objection to realism, which I call the Inconceivability Argument (since its conclusion is that realism is inconceivable or unintelligible). The received scholarly view of Schopenhauer’s supposedly conclusive disproof of realism is that it is nothing but a simple and familiar fallacy. I disagree; and in this paper I develop three ways of understanding the Inconceivability Argument, according to which Schopenhauer’s reductio is not an insubstantial and worthless sophism but a solid construction in which some valuable philosophical insights are embedded.