The Art of Controversy
- Language:
- English
- Status:
- Complete work
- Authorship:
- Written by the author
- Condition of the text:
- Clean text
- Extent:
- ~32,000 words · 152 passages
Cite this work
- APAArthur Schopenhauer. (n.d.). The Art of Controversy. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/schopenhauer/the-art-of-controversy
- MLAArthur Schopenhauer. "The Art of Controversy." SigPhi, https://sigphiai.com/en/works/schopenhauer/the-art-of-controversy.
- ChicagoArthur Schopenhauer. The Art of Controversy. SigPhi. https://sigphiai.com/en/works/schopenhauer/the-art-of-controversy.
What it is about
Thirty-eight tricks for winning an argument whether or not you are right. Written in earnest, not as a joke.
Context and history
The 'eristic dialectic' is a manual of argumentative bad faith, catalogued with precision: generalise your opponent's claim, anger him, attack the person when reasons run out. Schopenhauer presents it as what it is — a description of how people actually argue — which is why it works so well as a defence. This is an old English translation, in the public domain. The German original is also in the catalogue, and is what should be cited.
Editorial context, not a citable source: unlike the passages of the work itself, these statements cannot be checked against the corpus.
The volume now before the reader is a tardy addition to a series in which I have endeavoured to present Schopenhauer’s minor writings in an adequate form. Its contents are drawn entirely from his posthumous papers. A selection of them was given to the world some three of four years after his death by his friend and literary executor, Julius Frauenstädt, who for this and other offices of piety, has received less recognition than he deserves. The papers then published have recently been issued afresh, with considerable additions and corrections, by Dr. Eduard Grisebach, who is also entitled to gratitude for the care with which he has followed the text of the manuscripts, now in the Royal Library at Berlin, and for having drawn attention—although in terms that are unnecessarily severe—to a number of faults and failings on the part of the previous editor. The fact that all Schopenhauer’s works, together with a volume of his correspondence, may now be obtained in a certain cheap collection of the best national and foreign literature displayed in almost every bookshop in Germany, is sufficient evidence that in his own country the writer’s popularity is still very great; nor does the demand for translations indicate that his fame has at all diminished abroad. The favour with which the new edition of his posthumous papers has been received induces me, therefore, to resume a task which I thought, five years ago, that I had finally completed; and it is my intention to bring out one more volume, selected partly from these papers and partly from his Parerga. A small part of the essay on The Art of Controversy was published in Schopenhauer’s lifetime, in the chapter of the Parerga headed Zur Logik und Dialektik. The intelligent reader will discover that a good deal of its contents is of an ironical character. As regards the last three essays I must observe that I have omitted such passages as appear to be no longer of any general interest or otherwise u
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