Schopenhauer’s Pessimism Read Aloud

There are a number of read-aloud Schopenhauer selections on the web that you should be aware of, which cover very directly the pessimism he is most famous for but which we didn't cover in the episode. For instance:

Listen on youtube (There's nothing really to watch). Read the text.

This is over half an hour of simply the text, read slowly and pleasingly by D.E. Wittkower. I'm generally against philosophy audiobooks; it would be extremely difficult getting much out of Aristotle, for instance, much less Husserl or Heidegger, read aloud, as those texts need to be pored over, with the same sentence read multiple times. Of course, you can listen repeatedly, so it may work for some.

However, I've had good luck with some more popular philosophy writers in this respect, and Schopenhauer's prose is on the borderline of this type, I think, so give it a try. Other selections include more chapters of Studies in Pessimism (Note: the Kindle edition of this book is free), including "On Suicide," "On the Vanity of Existence," "Immortality: A Dialogue," "On Noise," "Of Women," and more.

-Mark Linsenmayer

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