By Alice Northover
It’s Friday once more and I’m holed up in my snow-proof bunker anticipating Nemo — both the storm and the movie.
Readers browsing through the damaged library of Holland House in West London, wrecked by a bomb on 22 October 1940.
The University of North Carolina’s Louis Round Wilson Special Collections Library is publishing one piece of Civil War-era correspondence a day, 150 years to the day after it was written.
Academic reference inflation has set in.
The Millions has their first original ebook.
Music at New York Fashion Week.
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Tracking people across security cameras today and forensic science of the Victorian era.
Bookish has finally launched and reaction is mixed.
Why aren’t academics tweeting? Not for the reasons you think.
Sir James may be number 1 in our estimation at the OED, but Google ranks him second to "Councilman #1" on Being Human. http://t.co/9bipfnCP .
The thriving academic blogosphere.
Why isn’t there cocaine in Coke anymore?
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Timbuktu’s priceless manuscripts saved.
Agatha Christie was investigated by MI5 over Bletchley Park mystery.
Clocks!
Teaching tips from Tim Gunn.
A Russian family cut off from the world for 40 years.
Sally Tomlinson’s life as a woman professor.
Alice Northover joined Oxford University Press as Social Media Manager in January 2012. She is editor of the OUPblog, constant tweeter @OUPAcademic, daily Facebooker at Oxford Academic, and Google Plus updater of Oxford Academic, amongst other things. You can learn more about her bizarre habits on the blog.
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The post Friday procrastination: Snow leopard edition appeared first on OUPblog.
On this day in history, February 22, 1788, Arthur Schopenhauer 
was born. In order to celebrate this famed philosopher I went to Oxford Reference Online which led me to The Oxford Companion to German Literature. In the excerpt below we learn about the work of Schopenhauer.
Schopenhauer, Arthur (Danzig, 1788–1860, Frankfurt/Main), the radical philosopher of pessimism, who described himself as the only worthy successor to Kant, assimilated all the negative trends of a disillusioned age. Like Voltaire, he mocked at the optimism of Leibniz, writing in a highly readable style, which enabled him to draw a Dantesque vision of suffering, demonstrating ‘welcher Art dieser meilleur des mondes possibles ist’. He had other rare gifts which made him conscious, when speaking about the few men endowed with genius, that he was one of them. This explains his reference to the average product of the human species as ‘Fabrikware der Natur’. He became known as a misanthropist (Menschenverächter), and as such is second only to Nietzsche. Schopenhauer was a highly complex individualist. His personal background counted with him more than with most philosophers and encouraged a stubbornly introspective nature. He had a wealthy and cultured father, whose financial acumen led him, as bank director, to spend much time abroad, including a few months in England, which Schopenhauer used with such profit that he read The Times daily for the rest of his life. In 1805 his father committed suicide. His mother, Johanna Schopenhauer, moved to Weimar. After studying science and philosophy at Göttingen and Berlin universities, Schopenhauer graduated in 1813 at Jena with his dissertation Über die vierfache Wurzel des Satzes vom zureichenden Grunde. A brief experience of the Wars of Liberation (see Napoleonic Wars) left him still more disillusioned with human nature. His mother, of whose social excesses Schopenhauer already disapproved, provoked a final rift, which contributed to his lifelong dislike of women.
Contact with Goethe, and in particular the reading of Goethe’s Farbenlehre, stimulated Schopenhauer’s treatise Über das Sehen und die Farben (1816), which he wrote in Dresden before he produced his principal work Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (1819). Years later it was followed by Über den Willen der Natur (1836), which was extended by further variants appearing in 1841 as Die beiden Grundprobleme der Ethik, containing two tracts, Über die Freiheit des Willens and Über das Fundament der Moral. Meanwhile he had qualified to lecture in Berlin (1820), where he hoped, by the force of his contrasting convictions, to deprive Hegel of his followers, an attempt which failed. He compensated himself by a ten-year stay in Italy before returning to Dresden and Berlin, which he left in haste for Frankfurt at the onset of the cholera epidemic which caused Hegel’s death (1831). Thus he survived a great rival, but lived unnoticed and lonely, until the mid-century brought him recognition. His Parerga und Paralipomena of 1851 proved particularly popular, and contained the well-known Aphorismen zur Lebensweisheit. In the early Frankfurt period his considerable artistic and linguistic talents enabled him to translate, from the Spanish, a work of his favourite writer, Balthasar Gracian’s Hand-Orakel und Kunst der Weltklugheit. It was published posthumously.
Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung does not presen
