Category: education
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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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‘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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‘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. 