History, Metaphors, Fables

History, Metaphors, Fables collects the central writings by Hans Blumenberg and covers topics such as on the philosophy of language, metaphor theory, non-conceptuality, aesthetics, politics, and literary studies. This landmark volume demonstrates Blumenberg's intellectual breadth and gives an overview of his thematic and stylistic range over four decades. Blumenberg's early philosophy of technology becomes tangible, as does his critique of linguistic perfectibility and conceptual thought, his theory of history as successive concepts of reality", his anthropology, or his studies of literature. History, Metaphors, Fables allows readers to discover a master thinker whose role in the German intellectual post-war scene can hardly be overestimated.

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.

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

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.

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.

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 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.

Helmut Müller-Sievers, University of Colorado Boulder:

Hans Blumenberg was a thinker of incomparable breadth and depth. He wrote with equal competence about theology and technics, metaphors and astronomy, and music and political theory. From the essays in this volume emerges a fascinating vision of human indigence and of the gods, machines, arguments, and artworks invented to conceal it.

Peter E. Gordon, Harvard University:

If the much-disparaged title of the 'humanist' retained any legitimacy in German letters following the mid-century catastrophe, it was mostly thanks to Hans Blumenberg, a thinker of enormous originality who travelled freely across the disciplines of philosophy, history, and literature. This collection of his writings is simply indispensable.