 After 1945 Blumenberg continued his studies of philosophy, Germanistics and classical 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