Jonathan Edwards and Arthur Schopenhauer on The Freedom of The Will: Two Philosophical Pessimists

"Who would have thought that Jonathan Edwards and Arthur Schopenhauer, the Puritan preacher and the German Gelehrter, had anything in common? As it turns out, a lot. It was William H. Squires who saw what they have in common is the metaphysical and psychological theory of voluntarism. ...I became interested in tracing the theme of the will throughout their works and found that what links them beyond their determinism is their common identification of the will as the primary factor in human psychology and even nature as the foundation of their ethics and aesthetics, that is, their psychological and metaphysical voluntarism as their idealism. The result of that undertaking is this book in which my early interests in Edwards and Schopenhauer converge." -from the author's "Preface"