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Hans Blumenberg was born on July 13, 1920 in Lübeck, Germany. He studied philosophy, German studies and classics (1939-47, interrupted by World War II). He died on March 28, 1996 in Altenberge (near Münster), Germany.

During his lifetime he was a member of the Senate of the German Research Foundation, a professor at several universities in Germany and a joint founder of the research group "Poetics and Hermeneutics".

He created what has come to be called "metaphorologism", which stated that what lies under the metaphor and language modisms, is the nearest to the truth (and the furthest from ideologies). His last works, especially "The sorrow crosses the river" (Die Sorge geht über den Fluss) are an attempt to apprehend human reality through its metaphors and unvoluntary expressions. Digging under apparently meaningless anecdotes of the history of occidental thought and literature, he tried to draw a map of the expressions, examples, gestures, that flourished in the discussion of what are thought to be more important matters. His work is full of a rare beauty, his interpretations are extremely unpredictable and subjective, all full of signs, indications and more or less ironic suggestions. Above all, it is a warning against the force of revealed truth, and for the beauty of a world in confusion.

He is the author of numerous important writings, including:

• (1947) Contributions to the problem of the originality of the medieval-scholastic ontology (doctoral thesis, unpublished).
• (1950) The ontological distance. An investigation into the crisis of Husserl's phaenomenology (Habilitation thesis, unpublished).
• (1966) The Legitimacy of the Modern Age.
• (1975) The Genesis of the Copernican World.
• (1979) The legibility of the world.
• (1979) Work on Myth
• (1986) Lifetime and world time.
• (1987) The sorrow that crosses the river.
• (1993) St Matthew Passion

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