A Note on Blumenberg's Beschreibung des Menschen

Description of the Human (Beschreibung des Menschen) was not published during Hans Blumenberg's lifetime; a posthumous compilation from two separate manuscripts by editor and former Blumenberg student Manfred Sommer, it was issued by Suhrkamp Verlag in 2006. It is based on lectures on the German tradition of philosophical anthropology that Blumenberg gave at the University of Münster in 1976–77 and 1980–81. Since Blumenberg did not date his lectures, it is possible that later or earlier text variants were included in the manuscript. This ambiguity is partly an artifact of Blumenberg's own way of working: because he wrote his books simultaneously, as Sommer puts it, but published them sequentially, passages in Blumenberg's manuscripts may date from radically different points in time. And since Blumenberg stopped publishing altogether in 1989—and decided to write only for his estate (Nachlass) as early as in the mid-Eighties—posthumous publication has become the...