Hans Blumenberg’s History of Astronomy: An Overview

Hans Blumenberg’s interest in the history of astronomy can be dated back to his first scholarly works. In the 1950s and 1960s, Blumenberg published several papers on Copernicus on Studium Generale and held a conference on the same topic at the Akademie der Wissenschaften und der Literatur zu Mainz on April 24, 1964. In addition to these early contributions, one should also mention Blumenberg’s introduction to a selection of Galileo Galilei’s writings. Thereafter, Blumenberg’s main contribution to the history of astronomy was fully developed in four main books: Die kopernikanische Wende, Die Genesis der kopernikanischen Welt, Das Lachen der Thrakerin, and the posthumous Die Vollzähligkeit der Sterne. One may also add to the list Lebenszeit und Weltzeit, where the mystery of time is addressed by Blumenberg as an attempt to overcome both Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and Husserl’s Phenomenology of Internal Time-Consciousness. In this chapter, I will focus on this substantial corpus of texts on modern astronomy and how Blumenberg’s interest extended to twentieth-century astronomy.