On the Fourfold Root of the Principle of Sufficient Reason / On Vision and Colours / On Will in Nature

This volume of new translations unites three shorter works by Arthur Schopenhauer that expand on themes from his book The World as Will and Representation. In On the Fourfold Root he takes the principle of sufficient reason, which states that nothing is without a reason why it is, and shows how it covers different forms of explanation or ground that previous philosophers have tended to confuse. Schopenhauer regarded this study, which he first wrote as his doctoral dissertation, as an essential preliminary to The World as Will. On Will in Nature examines contemporary scientific findings in search of corroboration of his thesis that processes in nature are all a species of striving towards ends; and On Vision and Colours defends an anti-Newtonian account of colour perception influenced by Goethe's famous colour theory. This is the first English edition to provide extensive editorial notes on the different published versions of these works.

David E. Cartwright is a Professor of Philosophy and Religious Studies and the chair of the Department of Philosophy and Religious Studies at the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater. He has numerous publications in nineteenth-century German philosophy and has edited and translated a number of Schopenhauer's books, most recently, with Edward E. Erdmann, The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics (2010); and he is the author of Schopenhauer: A Biography (2010).

Edward E. Erdmann is an emeritus faculty member of the University of Wisconsin, Whitewater with a scholarly background in classical and early modern rhetorical theory. He writes regularly on subjects in agriculture, has edited German translations of textbooks and scientific reports on organic agriculture.

Christopher Janaway is Professor of Philosophy at the University of Southampton. He has published widely on nineteenth-century German philosophy, including Self and World in Schopenhauer's Philosophy (1989), The Cambridge Companion to Schopenhauer (1999), Schopenhauer: A Very Short Introduction (2002), and Beyond Selflessness: Reading Nietzsche's Genealogy (2007). He is General Editor of The Cambridge Edition of the Works of Schopenhauer, in which he has translated The Two Fundamental Problems of Ethics and co-translated The World as Will and Representation, Volume 1.