Month: April 2014
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Overcoming alienation: On Stoterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life
This is the eighth set of reflections on Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). The first set of reflections can be read here. A summary of Stoterdijk’s principal theses is available here. * I am nearing the end of my excursus into the exercises that athletes of the spirit perform on themselves in order (a) to secede from ordinary…
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Overcoming sexual desire: On Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life
This is the seventh set of reflections on Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). The first set of reflections can be read here. A summary of Sloterdijk’s principal theses is available here. * Sloterdijk has written a book on anthropotechnics. He wants to redescribe human beings as those creatures who train themselves–some doing so explicitly, most implicitly–to…
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Overcoming burden: Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life
This is the sixth set of reflections on Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). The first set of reflections can be read here. A summary of Stoterdijk’s principal theses is available here. * Recall that Stoterdijk is singularly focused on how the practicing animal can become more than he is. Having seceded from the buzz and…
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Why are there so many claiming to be victims today?
My answer, which came during a conversation with one philosophical friend the other day, is only partial. Its scope is limited: today means ‘the modern age.’ And victimhood is restricted to ordinary claims about failure to secure certain goods. So, the discussion does not go so far as to take up the kinds of claims made, say,…
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Overcoming material scarcity: On Stoterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life
This is the fifth set of reflections on Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). The first set of reflections can be read here. A summary of Stoterdijk’s principal theses is available here. * If, as Stoterdijk insists, human beings are first and foremost practicing animals and if some practicing animals take human flourishing as their ultimate…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 