Theory of the Life-World

For more than three decades, Hans Blumenberg and Reinhart Koselleck maintained a correspondence that was characterized by mutual affection but also by distance. It shows two academic protagonists discuss the founding of universities and interdisciplinarity in times of university reform – and two sensitive scholars trying to communicate central aspects of their research: conceptual...

In January 1948, shortly after completing his doctorate, Hans Blumenberg begins working on his habilitation thesis. It quickly grows into a monumental project that wants nothing less than to...

When asked which contemporary philosopher he considered the most important, Hans Jonas answered more than once: Hans Blumenberg. Conversely, there were only few colleagues Blumenberg respected more than Jonas. Their correspondence, which spans almost 25 years, is a testament to their mutual esteem, but also to occasional tensions, and offers insights into the biographical and historical...

A line on a piece of paper – that is graphism in its simplest form. Analogous to the stem cells of biological research it can turn into many things: sign and sketch, text and image. In his richly illustrated study Manfred Sommer explores this graphic potential also in connection to Immanuel Kant: Might the spontaneous drawing of a line on the receptive paper, carried out with meaning and...

In 1947, Hans Blumenberg from Bargteheide in Holstein submits his doctoral thesis entitled »Contributions to the Problem of the Originality of the Medieval-Scholastic Ontology« and written under the most difficult personal circumstances to the Christian-Albrechts-University of Kiel.

In it, Blumenberg presents an examination of the thought of the Christian Middle Ages, with constant...

What do we mean when speaking about reality? What does realism of thoughts mean? How do humans come in contact with reality and become conscious of it? These fundamental questions occupied Hans Blumenberg all through his life, and they remained important undercurrents in many of his books. He never published a monograph about these topics, but he had been planning to do so, as documents in his...

From the early modern period and increasingly so since from the Enlightenment onwards, divine privilege of possessing unconditional truth has been challenged and made more democratic. The...

On the 27th of April 1988, the 50th anniversary of the death of Edmund Husserl, Hans Blumenberg noted: »The century now rushing towards its end will be regarded with hindsight by philosophy-historians as the ‘century’ of Phenomenology.« This prognosis is also an indicator of his own philosophical legacy: a phenomenological anthropology as developed by Blumenberg throughout his lifelong debate...

Long awaited and now available from the estate: Hans Blumenberg’s reviews, talks and lectures on international literature: Dostoyevsky, Sartre, Greene, Kafka, Jünger, Faulkner,...

What do Dürer’s Man Drawing a Reclining Woman, a window in an office block, and a poncho all have in common? At first glance, hardly anything, but upon closer inspection, something quite fundamental, and moreover ubiquitous: rectangular planes. Our world is filled with them, but they occur neither in nature nor in our imagination.

Starting from the picture...

In the 1950s and 1960s, Hans Blumenberg considered combining a philosophy of technology with a philosophy of time, which is only rarely mentioned today. This may be due to the fact that he never wrote a »Philosophy of Technology« – however, a series of shorter writings in which he develops his idea on the subject poignantly were found in his literary...

»For distinguished philosopher Hans Blumenberg, lions were a life-long obsession. Lions [...] collects thirty-two of Blumenberg’s philosophical vignettes to reveal that the...

The Corruptibility of the Philosopher is an account of the unlucky, grotesque or simply unpleasant cases in which the life and the works of philosophers cannot be aligned. An active...

»An important work by 20-century philosopher Hans Blumenberg, […] The Laughter of the Thracian Woman describes the reception history of an anecdote best known from...

With The Legibility of the World, Hans Blumenberg presents another piece to further elaborate his Metaphorology following Shipwreck with Spectator and thus provides another...

In this rich examination of how we inherit and transform myths, Hans Blumenberg continues his study of the philosophical roots of the modern world. Work on Myth is in five parts. The...