Junior Member Dean Dettloff will be defending his MA thesis on December 15. His thesis is titled “From Cynical Reason to Spiritual Creativity: An Exercise in Religious Anthropodicy.” Dean's thesis is an analysis of the thought of Peter Sloterdijk in particular his early description of the emergence of cynical reason as a post critical cultural and theoretical orientation to the world that is inoculated against any and all forms of Enlightenment criticism, and his later turn to religion as the site par excellence in which we human beings give an account of ourselves and our right to be in the world (a project he calls anthropodicy). Dean suggests that Sloterdijk's philosophy of religion would benefit from the spiritual and indeed Christian theory of creativity elaborated by the early twentieth century Russian thinker Berdaev. Indeed he sees real promise in Sloterdijk's notion of anthropodicy when supplemented with the radical religious openness of Berdaev's creativity.
