Peter Sloterdijk b. 1947

Peter Sloterdijk is a German philosopher and cultural theorist, long associated with the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, whose three-volume Spheres trilogy offered a sweeping spatial anthropology of human existence as a being-in-spheres, from the prenatal microsphere of the womb to the planetary macrosphere of globalization. His earlier Critique of Cynical Reason brought psychoanalysis and the Frankfurt School into contact with the classical Cynicism of Diogenes, while his recent You Must Change Your Life developed an immunological theory of practice in which the human is the animal that lives by exercises and self-formation.

Peter Sloterdijk was born at Karlsruhe in June 1947, the son of a German mother and a Dutch father. He studied philosophy, German literature, and history at Munich and Hamburg, and took his doctorate at Hamburg in 1975 with a dissertation on Weimar autobiography. After early engagements with the orange-clad Rajneesh movement at Pune, he returned to Germany and made his name with the two-volume Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), which became the bestselling philosophical book in postwar Germany. Since 1992 he has been a professor at the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design (HfG), serving as rector from 2001 to 2015, and from 2002 to 2012 co-hosted the ZDF television programme Das Philosophische Quartett with Rüdiger Safranski.

His books include the Critique of Cynical Reason (1983), Eurotaoism (1989), the trilogy Spheres — Bubbles (1998), Globes (1999), and Foam (2004) — Rules for the Human Zoo (1999), Rage and Time (2006), Derrida, an Egyptian (2007), You Must Change Your Life (2009), In the World Interior of Capital (2005), and What Happened in the 20th Century? (2016).

Sloterdijk distinguishes the cynical from the kynical, describes human existence as the inhabitation of nested 'spheres' of intimacy, atmosphere, and global insulation, and reads the modern condition as one of generalised self-formation through 'anthropotechnics'. His blend of philosophy, cultural diagnosis, and provocation has made him one of the most read and most contested German thinkers of his generation.