History, Metaphors, Fables

Hans Blumenberg (1920–1996) was one of the most important German philosophers of the twentieth century. An intellectual historian as well, he created the concept of metaphorology, which states that the limits of conceptual thought can be overcome by studying the world-views hidden in metaphors.Florian Fuchs is a Lecturer in Comparative Literature at Princeton University.Hannes Bajohr is a Research Fellow at the Media Studies Department at the University of Basel.Joe Paul Kroll is a freelance translator, editor, and writer.

The Reader is a kind of belated debutante ball for Hans Blumenberg, inviting a new audience to view Blumenberg not only at his entrance to scholarly life in the 1940s but also to key moments in his ascent of the rarefied staircase of German intellectual history, leading to rooms unintended for commoners.(Critical Inquiry) A landmark contribution to English-language work on Blumenberg. It gathers in a single paperback volume Blumenberg's most important essays, many of which also appear here in English for the first time. This will allow Blumenberg's thought to be read, cited, taught, and studied in English-speaking contexts on an entirely different scale and in entirely different ways than before... Here, in pieces intended for solo publication that range in length from four to approximately forty pages, the Reader presents a version of Blumenberg's thought that is sharper, spryer, more focused and more accessible than those that have appeared before.(The Germanic Review) Bound to provide much needed nourishment, History, Metaphors, Fables provides readers with a sample broad enough to appreciate the prolific scope of the author's interests, in subject matters and genres alike, yet reasoned enough to prevent a loss of bearings. The resulting compilation should enable inquiries for guiding threads across a vast and variegated corpus.(Contributions to the History of Concepts) The Reader provides us with an impressive cross-sectional sample of important essays by Blumenberg, essays that will make his ideas available in a serious form, but without the months-long labors necessary for any reader to make his or her way through the six to eight hundred page tomes that constitute the cornerstones of Blumenberg's approach.(PHILOSOPHICAL QUARTERLY) Bajohr, Fuchs, and Kroll have gathered, in the best translation this great prose stylist has received, fundamental short texts by Blumenberg that were the seeds of his later encyclopedic volumes(Common Knowledge)

• 1. The Linguistic Realityof Philosophy (1946/1947)2. World Pictures and World Models (1961)3. "Secularization": Critique of a Category ofHistorical Illegitimacy (1964)4. The Concept of Realityand the Theory of the State(1968/1969)5. Preliminary Remarks on the Concept of Reality(1974)6. Light as a Metaphorfor Truth: At the PreliminaryStage of Philosophical Concept Formation (1957)7. Introduction to Paradigms for a Metaphorology(1960)8. An Anthropological Approach to the ContemporarySignificance of Rhetoric(1971)9. Observations Drawn from Metaphors(1971)10. Prospect for a Theory of Nonconceptuality (1979)11. Theory of Nonconceptuality (circa 1975, excerpt)12. The Relationship between Nature and Technologyas a Philosophical Problem(1951)13. "Imitation of Nature":: Towarda Prehistory ofthe Idea of the Creative Being (1957)14. Phenomenological Aspects on Life-Worldand Technization (1963)15. Socrates and the objet ambigu: Paul Valéry'sDiscussion of the Ontology of the AestheticObject and Its Tradition (1964)16. The Essential Ambiguity of the AestheticObject (1966)17. Speech Situation and Immanent Poetics (1966)18. The Absolute Father(1952/1953)19. The Mythos and Ethos of Americain the Workof William Faulkner (1958)20. The Concept of Realityand the Possibility of theNovel (1964)21. Pensiveness (1980)22. Moments of Goethe (1982)23. Beyond the Edge of Reality: Three Short Essays (1983)24. Of Nonunderstanding: Glosses on Three Fables (1984)25. Unknown Aesopica: From Newly Found Fables (1985)26. Advancing into Eternal Silence: A Centuryafterthe Sailing of the Fram (1993)