Month: April 2014
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‘If the world is not fallen, then it is not in need of saving…’
Here is an excerpt from a post-philosophical conversation note I wrote to one philosophical friend today. All of the assumptions below are typically made. My tacit suggestion is that they amount to what Gilbert Ryle famously terms ‘category mistakes.’ Of course, some things are problems; but, logically speaking, a human life cannot be a problem. It…
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The main theses of Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life
This is the fourth 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. * Let us review what we know about Stoterdijk’s basic philosophical orientation. 1.) Human beings are first and foremost practicing animals. Most practice what they do implicitly: even an ignoramus, Stoterdijk contends,…
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Conversion and elitism: A propaedeutic to reading Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life
This is the third set of reflections on Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). In the post below, I am tacking back, by way of Charles Taylor’s work, in order to understand how Stoterdijk arrived at his version of neo-Nietzschean elitism. The first set of reflections can be read here. * Before one…
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‘All education is conversion’: Reflections on Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life
This is the second set of reflections on Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). The first set can be read here. * In his provocative book You Must Change Your Life, Peter Sloterdijk advances the thesis that human beings are inexplicitly or explicitly training animals. His principal question therefore is, ‘Can human beings overcome…
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‘You must change your life’ or ‘You must change life’?
This is the first set of reflections on Peter Sloterdijk’s You Must Change Your Life: On Anthropotechnics (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013). * ‘You must change your life,’ writes Peter Sloterdijk in his eponymous book of philosophy. His provocative project is to redescribe human beings in terms of forms of practice or training programs. Some programs are explicit (such as those…
Andrew Taggart, Ph.D. 