Philosophical anthropology emerges, partly at least, by dissatisfied and critical followers of Husserl’s phenomenology, such as Max Scheler and the young Martin Heidegger. They were dissatisfied with what they saw as a disregard of the concrete human being as an essential part of phenomenological analysis. They tried instead to claim that philosophy must search for, and anchor, its foundations exclusively in the human being, not as an abstract entity, but as an existential, concrete, physical being. In this specific philosophical, as (...) well as historical, context this paper suggests to locate Hans Blumenberg’s philosophical project by reconstructing his unique version of philosophical anthropology. The main aim of the paper is to describe and understand the way Blumenberg combines his theory of metaphors together with his anthropological considerations regarding the origin and emergence of human culture into his own version of philosophical anthropology. A version that can be seen as joining the original attempt of philosophical anthropology to overcome the deficiency in Husserl’s phenomenological project. (shrink)

ExcerptA series of recent works have explored Hans Blumenberg's metaphorology in its relation to anthropology and the hermeneutics of the lifeworld.1 In what follows, I would like to foreground another aspect of his work by describing the metaphorology and the earlier works on the history of philosophy as works of discourse analysis. From such a perspective, linguistic forms appear less as the expression of anthropological and lifeworld circumstances than as the continuation and transformation of intra-discursive, historical-systematic decisions. I suggest that (...) the functional-anthropological and the discourse-analytical readings of Blumenberg supplement one another insofar as they each give weight to different…. (shrink)