philology at the University of Hamburg, and graduated in 1947 with a dissertation on the origin of the ontology of the Middle Ages, at the University of Kiel. He received the postdoctoral habilitation in 1950, with a dissertation on Ontological Distance, an Inquiry into the Crisis of Edmund Husserl's Phenomenology (Die ontologische Distanz: Eine Untersuchung über die Krisis der Phänomenologie Husserls). His mentor during these years was Ludwig Landgrebe. During Blumenberg's lifetime he was a member of the Senate of the German Research Foundation, a professor at several universities in Germany and a joint founder of the research group "Poetics and Hermeneutics". Work Blumenberg's work was of a predominantly historical nature, characterized by his great philosophical and theological learning, and by the precision and pointedness of his writing style. The early text "Paradigms for a Metaphorology" explicates the idea of 'absolute metaphors', by way of examples from the history of ideas and philosophy. According to Blumenberg, metaphors of this kind, such as "the naked truth", are to be considered a fundamental aspect of philosophical discourse that cannot be replaced by concepts and reappropriated into the logicity of the 'actual'. The distinctness and meaning of these metaphors constitute the perception of reality as a whole, a necessary prerequisite for human orientation, thought and action. The founding idea of this first text was further developed in works on the metaphors of light in theories of knowledge, of being in navigation (Shipwreck with Spectator, 1979) and the metaphors of books and reading. (The Legibility of the World, 1979) In Blumenberg's many inquiries into the history of philosophy the threshold of the late Middle Ages and the early Renaissance provides a focal point (Legitimacy of the Modern Age and The Genesis of the Copernican World). Inspired by (amongst others) Ernst Cassirer's functional perspective on the history of ideas and philosophy, and the concomitant view of a rearrangement within the spiritual relationships specific to an epoch, Blumenberg rejects the substantialism of historical continuity — fundamental to the so-called 'theorem of secularization'; the Modern age in his view represents an independent epoch opposed to Antiquity and the Middle Ages by a rehabilitation of human curiosity in reaction to theological absolutism. "Hans Blumenberg targets Karl Löwith's argument that progress is the secularization of Hebrew and Christian beliefs and argues to the contrary that the modern age, including its belief in progress, grew out of a new secular