Johanna Schopenhauer was the first German woman to publish books without a pseudonym, an influential literary salon host, and in the 1820s a popular author in Germany. She was also the mother of the German philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer.

Arthur Schopenhauer was a German philosopher. 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 (1724–1804), Schopenhauer developed an atheistic metaphysical and ethical system that rejected the contemporaneous ideas of German idealism.