Peter Sloterdijk

Peter Sloterdijk (born in Karlsruhe in 1947) is a German philosopher and cultural theorist whose work moves between university teaching and public debate. His father was Dutch and his mother German. He studied philosophy, German literature and history in Munich and Hamburg between 1968 and 1974, and completed his doctorate in Hamburg in 1975. He began within the orbit of the Frankfurt School, but soon felt that its critical analyses remained trapped in a rather gloomy way of thinking.

In 1978 he became a disciple of Rajneesh, later known as Osho, and lived in his ashram until 1980. That experience changed his approach to philosophy. His Critique of Cynical Reason (1983) became one of the best-selling works of German philosophy after the war, and while it still belonged to the critique of instrumental reason, his later books adopted a more daring, provocative and literary tone.

From 2001 to 2015 he was rector of the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design, and from 2002 he co-hosted the television programme Das Philosophische Quartett. His thought centres on the Spheres trilogy (Bubbles, Globes and Foams), in which he explores the spaces in which humans live together, from the intimacy of the womb to great political and technological structures. Against traditional dualisms such as body and soul, subject and object, culture and nature, he proposes hybrid realities, and he has called for a new ontological constitution that would include humans, animals, plants and machines.

His influence reaches media theory, philosophical anthropology and debates about posthumanism. His public disputes with Habermas over humanism, sparked by Rules for the Human Zoo, brought him wide attention, and his media-friendly style has earned him both admiration and criticism in academic circles.