Review of Sophia Vasalou *Schopenhauer and the Aesthetic Standpoint: Philosophy as a Practice of the Sublime* (CUP 2013)

Vasalou starts out forthrightly by declaring that Schopenhauer’s arguments are so bad—“vulnerable to multiple stress fractures upon the lightest probing” (4)—that his claims cannot be understood as conclusions but should be interpreted as “symptoms”. (142) But Schopenhauer’s philosophy is not the expression of idiosyncratic biographical facts. The “temptations” he gave in to are also ones “to which we ourselves are inescapably exposed”. (209) For Vasalou Schopenhauer’s pessimism is an expression of the “sense of evaluative collapse” (196) in Alasdair MacIntyre’s account of modernity as disenchantment and de-traditionalization. To correct Schopenhauer’s position, we need a little help from the classical tradition, and especially Aristotle’s portrait of the great-souled man. But Vasalou’s title comes not from this correction, which occupies the second half of the text, but from her novel analysis of Schopenhauer’s philosophical position as inseparable from the aesthetically sublime.