The Legitimacy of the Modern Age

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MIT Press, Oct 21, 1985 - Philosophy - 712 pages
In this major work, Blumenberg takes issue with Karl Löwith's well-known thesis that the idea of progress is a secularized version of Christian eschatology, which promises a dramatic intervention that will consummate the history of the world from outside. Instead, Blumenberg argues, the idea of progress always implies a process at work within history, operating through an internal logic that ultimately expresses human choices and is legitimized by human self-assertion, by man's responsibility for his own fate.

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Contents

Status of the Concept
3
Progress Exposed as Fate
27
Making History So As to Exonerate God?
53
The Supposed Migration of the Attribute of Infinity
77
The Rhetoric of Secularizations
103
Introduction
125
A Systematic Comparison of the Epochal Crisis of
145
The Impossibility of Escaping a Deceiving God
181
Curiosity Is Enrolled in the Catalog of Vices
309
Difficulties Regarding the Natural Status of the
325
Preludes to a Future Overstepping of Limits
343
Interest in Invisible Things within the World
361
Justifications of Curiosity as Preparation for the
377
Voltaire to
403
Feuerbach and
437
The Cusan
455

Cosmogony as a Paradigm of SelfConstitution
205
Introduction
229
The Retraction of the Socratic Turning
243
The Indifference of Epicuruss Gods
263
Preparations for a Conversion and Models for the
279
The World as Gods SelfRestriction
483
The World as Gods SelfExhaustion
549
Notes
597
Name Index
671
Copyright

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About the author (1985)

Hans Blumenberg, the creator of metaphorology, was one of the most important German philosophers of the latter 20th century.

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