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Hans Blumenberg

Hans Blumenberg, the creator of metaphorology, was one of the most important German philosophers of the latter 20th century.

Titles by This Author

Shipwreck with Spectator

Paradigm of a Metaphor for Existence
By Hans Blumenberg

This elegant essay exemplifies Blumenberg's ideas about the ability of the historical study of metaphor to illuminate essential aspects of being human. Originally published in the same year as his monumental Work on Myth, Shipwreck with Spectator traces the evolution of the complex of metaphors related to the sea, to shipwreck, and to the role of the spectator in human culture from ancient Greece to modern times.The sea is one of humanity's oldest metaphors for life, and a sea journey, Blumenberg observes, has often stood for our journey through life.

The Genesis of the Copernican World

By Hans Blumenberg

This major work by the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg is a monumental rethinking of the significance of the Copernican revolution for our understanding of modernity. It provides an important corrective to the view of science as an autonomous enterprise and presents a new account of the history of interpretations of the significance of the heavens for man.

Hans Blumenberg is Professor of Philosophy, emeritus, at the University of Munster in West Germany. This book is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought, edited by Thomas McCarthy

Work on Myth

By Hans Blumenberg

The Legitimacy of the Modern Age

By Hans Blumenberg

In this major work, Blumenberg takes issue with Karl Löwith's well-known thesis that the idea of progress is a secularized version of Christian eschatology, which promises a dramatic intervention that will consummate the history of the world from outside. Instead, Blumenberg argues, the idea of progress always implies a process at work within history, operating through an internal logic that ultimately expresses human choices and is legitimized by human self-assertion, by man's responsibility for his own fate.