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Report

Philosophical Rumblings in the German Republic: Der Philosophenstreit

Mark Peacock reports on a massive public row involving philosophy, history, language and genetic engineering.

Intellectual opinion plays a remarkably important role in German political debates, especially when they concern German history and its ramifications; a good example was the discussion surrounding the erection of a national monument to the victims of the Holocaust. Conversely, debates of a more narrowly ‘intellectual’ nature are often conducted in the German press; the Historikerstreit in 1986, in which historians debated the ‘uniqueness’ of the Holocaust, is a case in point. The latest episode in this tradition of public debate is a Philosophenstreit, the peculiar course of which shows how academic opinion can send tremors through an entire nation.

The central player is Peter Sloterdijk, author and professor of aesthetics in Karlsruhe. A somewhat renegade figure, he came to public attention with his bestselling Critique of Cynical Reason (1983).

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