If one compares Hans Blumenberg with the dominant contemporary German-speaking characters of philosophy and heads of their own schools, Husserl, Heidegger and Adorno, then one sees that Blumenberg’s understanding of philosophy proves tobe emphatically unemphatic, withdrawn, and deeply stacked. He exchanges the big bills of those philosophies for small coins: Philosophy is attention first, thoughtfulness second, consolation third, and memory fourth. – An introduction is evidence of the reorientation that Blumenberg undertook in the 1950s with regard to his Catholic-theological and (...) Heideggerian philosophical beginnings. This led him to redefine the modern age from one of crisis to one of overcoming the crisis. (shrink)