wrote his Ph.D. thesis on Literature and the Organization of Life Experience. Theory and History of Autobiography in the Weimar Republic 1918–1933 under the supervision of Klaus Briegleb in 1976. Between 1978 and 1980, Sloterdijk resided in the ashram of Bhagwan Shree Rajneesh in the Indian city of Poona and has been working as a freelance writer since the 1980s. His book, Kritik der zynischen Vernunft, published by Suhrkamp in 1983 and translated into English as Critique of Cynical Reason in 1988, is one of the bestselling philosophical books of the twentieth century. From 2001 to 2015, Sloterdijk was the director of the Karlsruhe University of Arts and Design.