Abstract

Since its publication in 1960, Hans Blumenberg′s first book, Paradigmatic Instances towards a Metaphorology, has remained both an esoteric pamphlet for the initiated and a riddled challenge for the many. It offers an answer to the methodological problems left by Husserl′s diagnosis of the Crisis of European Sciences and Heidegger′s ‘History of Being’. Blumenberg′s project of a historically reflected phenomenology introduces the Aristotelian paleonym of ‘metaphor’ as a systematic instrument in the archeological investigation and analysis of philosophy′s coming to conceive of itself in self-reflective conceptual thought