 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".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.