Hastie, T., Tibshirani R. and Friedman, J. (2008). The Elements of Statistical Learning. 2nd ed. Stanford: Springer. p.116, the author states that the optimisation problem of the Fisher's LDA is (Equation 4.16),
\begin{equation} J = \max_{\mathbf{w}} \mathbf{w}^T \mathbf{S_B} \mathbf{w}, \end{equation} subject to the constraint \begin{equation} \mathbf{w}^{T} \mathbf{S_W} \mathbf{w} = 1. \end{equation}
This problem can be solved using Lagrangian optimisation, by rewriting the cost function in the Lagrangian form,
\begin{equation} L = \mathbf{w}^T \mathbf{S_B} \mathbf{w} + \lambda(1 - \mathbf{w}^{T} \mathbf{S_W} \mathbf{w}). \end{equation}
Now, it is possible to take the partial derivative of this function to find maxima,
\begin{equation} \frac{\partial L}{\partial \mathbf{w}} = \mathbf{S_b} \mathbf{w} - \lambda \mathbf{S_w} \mathbf{w}. \end{equation}
Setting this zero and rearranging we obtain,
\begin{equation} \mathbf{S_b} \mathbf{w} = \lambda \mathbf{S_w} \mathbf{w} .\end{equation}
Notice, that we can rearrange this to the form of an eigenvalue problem. The equation of an eigenvalue problem is
\begin{equation} \mathbf{A} \mathbf{w} = \lambda \mathbf{w}. \end{equation}
So by inspection and rearranging we can see, that the optimisation problem can be recasted to finding the eigenvectors of the matrix $ \mathbf{S_w}^{-1} \mathbf{S_b} $.
I think further insight into this problem can be obtained by comparing it with Principal Components Analysis. If you have a solid understanding on why PCA results in a generalised eigenvalue problem, then it becomes much more straightforward that LDA is effectively a "regularisation" of the PCA problem and thus leads to a similar solution.