Arthur Schopenhauer, a German philosopher who emphasizes the force of the human will, was born in the city of Danzig (Gdańsk), the son of Heinrich Floris Schopenhauer and Johanna Schopenhauer, both descendants of wealthy German Patrician families.

When the Kingdom of Prussia acquired the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth city of Danzig in 1793, Schopenhauer's family had moved to Hamburg.

Schopenhauer's father may have committed suicide in 1805.

Shortly thereafter, Schopenhauer's mother Johanna moved to Weimar, at this time the center of German literature, to pursue her writing career.

After one year, Schopenhauer left the family business in Hamburg to join her.

In 1809, he became a student at the University of Göttingen, where he studied metaphysics and psychology under the author of Aenesidemus, Gottlob Ernst Schulze, who had advised him to concentrate on Plato and Immanuel Kant.

In Berlin, from 1811 to 1812, he had attended lectures by the prominent post-Kantian philosopher Johann Gottlieb Fichte and the theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher.

In 1814, Schopenhauer had begun his seminal work The World as Will and Representation (Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung).

Completing it in 1818, he publishes it the following year.

In Dresden in 1819, Schopenhauer fathers, with a servant, an illegitimate daughter who is born and dies the same year.