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"Arthur Schopenhauer (February 22, 1788 – September 21, 1860) was a German philosopher. He is most famous for his work The World as Will and Idea.

Schopenhauer called himself a Kantian, but hurled invective at several other contemporary German philosophers who had been influenced by Kant. These included Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling. He formulated a pessimistic philosophy that gained importance and support after the failure of the German and Austrian revolutions of 1848.

Schopenhauer's starting point was Kant's division of the universe into the phenomenal and the noumenal. Schopenhauer extended Kant's ideas to, in his opinion, gain greater understanding of the noumenal. For instance, he suggested that noumenal reality was singular because multiplicity was part of phenomenal experience. Some commentators suggest that Schopenhauer claimed that the noumenon was the same as that in us which we call Will. Other commentators, like Bryan Magee, suggest that he considered will to be the most immediate manifestation of the noumenon that we can experience. Given his adoration of Kant it is difficult to see how Schopenhauer could have held that the noumenon could be known in any way."

Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Schopenhauer