The Art of Philosophy: Wisdom as a Practice Kindle Edition

Conferences in form of a book! This book helps us to grasp with enogh depth Sloterdijk inovative ideas on Philosophy and Religion as trainning. He links art and Philosophy in an way that is quite criative. It's a perfect option to get into this extraordinary philosopher.

Peter Sloterdijik is a prolific and original contemporary philosopher in the best Western tradition. His writings deserve careful reading, though some of them are quite demanding and require background knowledge. Thus, to fully benefit from this 107 pages short book one should first read his 500 pages book You Must Change your Life!.
At the center of The Art of Philosophy is the seeking of a detached "angelic" view of the world with the help of a fitting way of life, as central to Plato and most of pre-modern Western philosophy, in contrast to an "embedded" view of the mind as bound by the body, emotions and one's habitus in time-space. The latter puts strict limits on human ability to arrive at absolutely true theories, and the very concept of such theories; while the first, though recognizing the limits of most human beings, regard some approximation of theories uncontaminated by human limits as achievable by persons who distance themselves from the world in one way or another.
The author might have done well to include at least some discourse on relevant Asian philosophies, and take into account other treatments, such as by Thomas Nagel in his book The View from Nowhere (1986). Consideration of differences between social theories, which are clearly very influenced by emotions and contexts, and abstract physical theories, such as quantum theory, which also depend on propensities of the human mind but are much less biased by personality features and habitus, might have added a lot to the book. But, instead of going into substance, I would like to apply the book briefly to the context of public policy making on two levels: intelligence analysts and political leaders.
Intelligence analysts are very susceptible to influence by institutional cultures, personal values and hierarchical pressures. Therefore, efforts to include in their work "distance-creating" practices, such as time for solitary thinking and exposure to different cultures and life experiences, are mandatory. It seems that this is seldom done.
Even more pressing is the need to get political leaders out from current pressure overloads, which cannot but spoil their decisions. Retreats, Sabbaticals, remonstrating pluralistic advisors - these illustrate doable recommendations. But, first, they must be made aware of their dependence on biased theories, however "pragmatic" they see themselves, so as to open their minds to integrate at least some "contemplation" and abstract thinking into "action". This is all the more urgently needed for coping with unprecedented dangers and opportunities increasingly facing humanity.
I recommend this book for careful reading with such or other applications in mind.
Professor Yehezkel Dror
The Hebrew University of Jerusalem

The best I could say for this book is that it kept my attention to the end. Sloterdijk is interesting if you take him to be doing a kind of intellectual history. He has managed to connect up several strands of a philosophical tradition that goes back to Socrates and extends to Husserl and that emphasizes the idea of philosophical detachment. Sloterdijk is especially taken with the idea of epoche as found in Husserl's writings. I first studied Husserl under Maurice Natanson at UC Santa Cruz. Natanson treated the epoche as a kind of mystical thing: either you got it or you didn't. I had recently rejected Christianity and was not ready to take up another set of beliefs based on faith. Now, many years later, I find that Sloterdijk is presenting something similar. His efforts to recover pure thought and transcendent experience get sort of manic in the last chapter when he talks about various attempts to "assassinate" the neutral observer i.e. the one Husserl tried to create (or revive). The assassins include Marx, Nietzsche, and Heidegger (although the last one recanted after WWII), and then, get this, the nuclear bomb! I always did enjoy the passage in the Symposium where Socrates was lost in thought, but Sloterdijk makes a big deal of this, as also the idea that philosophy is practicing to die. Frankly, one cannot know what Socrates' contemplative moments gave him, and it is hard to make any sense at all of practicing to die unless you really believe in an afterlife or the possibility of complete detachment from the body. Readers who want to follow the vita contempliva could get more out of the Zen Buddhist tradition which at least gives one various meditative practices tested over time. Sloterdijk just gives us intellectual history in the form of a series of bon mots and a lot of complaining. Although Sloterdijk insists that the epoche needs to be examined in neutral terms, by the end of the book one doesn't feel that this is the point, but rather that philosophers should detach themselves from life and try to become like angels. You have to be kidding. One is tempted to follow Nietzsche's Zarathustra here and classify this guy as one of the "preachers of death." There is a lot to the ideas of contemplation, philosophy as contemplation, and phenomenology, as long as one does not take this to be a science-like activity that gives up apodictic truths, something more like an art. This is why I was attracted to this book originally: after all it was called "the art of philosophy." But that turns out to be a misnomer. The translator admits in the opening note that the original title was "Suspended Animation in Thought," which pretty much sums it up. In my view, a much more effective thinker on the nature of thought is John Dewey, the great American pragmatist. Dewey would have been rightly horrified by a sentence like this: "Thinking creates an artificial autism that isolates the thinker and takes him to a special world of imperatively connected ideas." Autism is good?