 ("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.