Religion: A Dialogue, and Other Essays

The centrepiece of this volume is one of the great set-pieces of nineteenth-century philosophy: a long imagined dialogue between Demopheles, who defends religion as a necessary metaphysics for the people, and Philalethes, the lover of truth, who answers him with steadily mounting force. Around it Schopenhauer arranges shorter, sharper essays — on free will, on women, on education, on physiognomy, on the Christian system — that show his thought working at full pressure on the subjects most likely to provoke. First translated into English by T. Bailey Saunders in 1889, this is Schopenhauer at his most provocative: the philosopher whose religious skepticism shaped the young Nietzsche and the early Freud.