Peter Sloterdijk
Peter Sloterdijk was born in 1947 in Karlsruhe, German federal state of Baden Württemberg, in a family of Dutch origin, as could be deduced from their last name. He remained attached to his native city, although he graduated in humanities, including philosophy, philology and history, in Munich and acquired a PhD in Hamburg. In his thirties he published his famous work, Critique of Cynical Reason, the most sold and deemed the most widespread philosophical book in German in a long time. His cultural mission is perhaps best illustrated by the position he held for 20 years at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna, where he managed the Institute of Cultural Philosophy. At the same time, all until recently, he was a professor of philosophy and media theory at the University of Art and Design in Karlsruhe and a long-time dean of the institution. He adamantly defended the maintenance of philosophical discourse’s influence in German public as a protagonist of ZDF’s TV programme Das Philosophische Quartett, but when Sloterdijk is mentioned as a philosopher, cultural scholar, essayist and communicator, this implies a much broader scope than his interpretation of cultural changes, as a thought and as a study, received from global networks. Without avoiding provocative questions, such as What if Europe wakes up, or controversies with academic criticism, it is not by chance that Sloterdijk has earned an honour with Freud’s name for scholarly prose: “That written philosophy has managed from its beginning more than 2500 years ago until the present day to remain virulent (contagious) is a result of its capacity to make friends through its texts. It has been reinscribed like a chain-letter through the generations, and despite all the errors of reproduction, indeed, perhaps because of such errors, has recruited its copyists and interpreters into the ranks of brotherhood.” (Rules for the Human Zoo)
(Photo © Antonia Jacobsen)