The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought)

✍ Scribed by Hans Blumenberg

• Publisher: The MIT Press
• Year: 1985
• Tongue: English
• Leaves: 1416
• Category: Library

✦ Synopsis

In this book, Hans Blumenberg disputes the view that the modern idea of progress represents a secularization of religious belief in some divine intervention (the coming of the Messiah, the end of the world) which consummates human history from outside. Drawing from sources ranging from Aristotle and Augustine to Nietzsche, Marx, Freud, and Kuhn - with an impressive number of stops between - he argues that progress always implies a process at work within history, a process that ultimately expresses human choices, human self-assertion, and man's responsibility for his own fate.Hans Blumenberg has been associated with Kiel University in Hamburg since 1947. The book is included in the series Studies in Contemporary German Social Thought.

✦ Table of Contents

The Legitimacy of the Modern Age......Page 2
Contents......Page 4
Series Foreword......Page 8
Translator's Introduction......Page 10
Part I: Secularization: Critique of a Category of Historical Wrong......Page 32
Status of the Concept......Page 34
A Dimension of Hidden Meaning?......Page 44
Progress Exposed as Fate......Page 58
Instead of Secularization of Eschatology, Secularization, by Eschatology......Page 68
Making History So As to Exonerate God?......Page 84
The Secularization Thesis as an Anachronism in the Modern Age......Page 94
The Supposed Migration of the Attribute of Infinity......Page 108
Political Theology I and II......Page 120
Part II: Theological Absolutism and Human Self-Assertion......Page 154
Introduction......Page 156
World Loss and Demiurgic Self-Determination......Page 168
A Systematic Comparison of the Epochal Crisis of Antiquity to That of the Middle Ages......Page 176
The Impossibility of Escaping a Deceiving God......Page 212
Cosmogony as a Paradigm of Self-Constitution......Page 236
Part III: The 'Trial' of Theoretical Curiosity......Page 258
Introduction......Page 260
The Retraction of the Socratic Turning......Page 274
The Indifference of Epicurus's Gods......Page 294
Skepticism Contains a Residue of Trust in the Cosmos......Page 300
Preparations for a Conversion and Models for the Verdict of the 'Trial'......Page 310
Curiosity Is Enrolled in the Catalog of Vices......Page 340
Difficulties Regarding the 'Natural' Status of the Appetite for Knowledge in the Scholastic System......Page 356
Preludes to a Future Overstepping of Limits......Page 374
Interest in Invisible Things within the World......Page 392
Justifications of Curiosity as Preparation for the Enlightemnent......Page 408
Curiosity and the Claim to Happiness: Voltaire to Kant......Page 434
The Integration into Anthropology: Feuerbach and Freud......Page 468
Part IV: Aspects of the Epochal Threshold: The Cusan and the Nolan......Page 486
The Epochs of the Concept: of an Epoch......Page 488
The Cusan: The World as God's Self-Restriction......Page 514
The Nolan: The World as God's Self-Exhaustion......Page 580
Notes......Page 628
Name Index......Page 702