Scheintod im Denken

In his much-read and much-praised book Du musst dein Leben ändern (You must change your life), Peter Sloterdijk emphasized practice as the decisive human condition. In his new book he analyses the observation of science and the actions of the scientist, which is fundamentally changed by this new perspective on human thought and action. Peter Sloterdijk understands science as a way of bringing the scientist himself to life with the help of science-generating exercise methods.
This history spans more than 2000 years of development. It begins with Plato's account of his Athenian teacher: he suffered from the fact that he carried with him a strong inner monologue that made him dispose to simply stop at the Academy. So the original academy is a training centre where people learn to get lost in the world according to the rules of art. Even today's universities have achieved a great deal in this field. They too are in the tradition of these Platonic "absence accommodations", they too establish the liaison between the otherness of thought and the otherness of thought that makes the practice of science possible in the first place.