Schopenhauer versus (?) Kant on Self-Consciousness and Freedom

This paper examines Schopenhauer's Prize Essay On the Freedom of the Will. My analysis suggests that there is a tension between the negative argument expounded in the first four parts and the final part where Schopenhauer proposes the Kantian, idealist reconciliation of natural necessity and freedom. The remainder of the paper examines this tension by comparing Schopenhauer's and Kant's relevant views, noting several important differences in their respective accounts of the causality of freedom, empirical character, and the metaphysics of the free self. In the final part of the paper, I argue that Schopenhauer's view in the Prize Essay does not fully cohere with the account of free will he gives in the World as Will and Representation (when he emphasizes his key idea that the will to life may negate itself). The latter account seems closer to Kant's doctrine than the Prize Essay view in several respects.