Essai sur le libre arbitre

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788–1860) was the son of a wealthy Danzig merchant and a successful novelist. His great work, The World as Will and Representation, appeared in 1818 and was almost entirely ignored; when he taught in Berlin, he scheduled his lectures at the same hour as Hegel's, and almost no students came.

He spent the rest of his life in Frankfurt with a succession of poodles, convinced of his own genius, until his collection of essays, Parerga and Paralipomena, finally brought him fame in 1851; a selection is in the library as Essays. He was the first major Western philosopher to draw seriously on Indian thought, calling the Upanishads the consolation of his life.