Arthur Schopenhauer, also known as the “Philosopher of Pessimism”, was a German philosopher and writer. He is known for his 1818 work The World as Will and Representation, which characterizes the phenomenal world as the manifestation of a blind and irrational noumenal will. Building on the transcendental idealism of Immanuel Kant, Schopenhauer developed an atheistic, metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism. February 22, 1788 – September 21, 1860; died at 72. Alive at the same time as Abraham Lincoln, Leo Tolstoy, Charles Darwin, Ludwig van Beethoven, and Karl Marx. Wiki link