Hans Blumenberg's History and Philosophy of Science

This book highlights and develops a hitherto neglected area of Hans Blumenberg's contributions, i.e., history and philosophy of science. It covers both Blumenberg’s works on the history of ideas and conceptual change, as well as his studies on transformative periods and his intellectual history of technology. Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) was one of the leading German philosophers after the Second World War, bridging from the continental tradition of philosophy, conceptual history and metaphorology. This volume, though, explores the methodological instruments that he developed and how we may use them to do history and philosophy of science. In doing so it opens up a new field of research and provides insight into further developing a continental history and philosophy of science, making this book of great interest to both historians and philosophers alike.

Alberto Fragio Gistau

Alberto Fragio is full professor in the Department of Humanities at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana de México, Unidad Cuajimalpa. He earned his Ph.D. in Philosophy (2007) from the Universidad Autónoma of Madrid (Spain), and in Cultural Science (2011) from Scuola Internazionale di Alti Studi di Modena (Italy). From 2007 to 2010 he undertook a dedicated research project on Hans Blumenberg’s history and philosophy of science with the support of the Fondazione Collegio San Carlo (Italy). He has published Paradigmen zu einer Metaphorologie des Kosmos. Hans Blumenberg und die zeitgenössischen Metaphern des Universums (Nomos/Verlag Karl Alber, 2023). On this same author, he has co-edited Hans Blumenberg. Nuovi paradigmi d’analisi (Roma, 2010), and Metaphorologie, Anthropologie, Phänomenologie. Neue Forschungen zum Nachlass Hans Blumenbergs (Freiburg/München, 2019).

Josefa Ros Velasco

Josefa Ros Velasco is a Marie Sklodowska-Curie Actions postdoctoral researcher at the Complutense University of Madrid, where she is the PI of the project “Pre-bored. Well-being and prevention of boredom in Spanish nursing homes” (2021-2024). Previously, she was a postdoctoral researcher for the Postdoctoral Research Fellowships at Harvard University for Distinguished Junior Scholars program (2017-2021). She is a specialist in Boredom Studies from a multidisciplinary perspective, and the founder and president of the International Society of Boredom Studies. She is the author of the book The Disease of Boredom (Princeton University Press, 2025), and editor of books such as Suicide in Modern Literature (Springer, 2021) or Boredom Is in Your Mind (Springer, 2019). For her academic achievements, she received distinctions such as the Spanish National Research Prize 2022 or the Harvard University Lincoln Book Prize 2019, among others.

Martina Philippi

Martina Philippi did her Ph.D. in philosophy on Edmund Husserl’s phenomenology. She worked at Leipzig University and Ruhr-University Bochum and is currently a postdoc researcher in the Collaborate Research Center “Constructing Explainability” (SFB/TRR 318) at Paderborn University. Her main topics are phenomenology and ethics of Artificial Intelligence and Digital Transformation. Book publications: Metaphorologie, Anthropologie, Phänomenologie. Neue Forschungen zum Nachlass Hans Blumenberg (together with Alberto Fragio and Josefa Ros Velasco, Alber Verlag, Freiburg/Br., 2020); Selbstverständlichkeit und Problematisierung. Husserls Programm der Phänomenologie (Fink Verlag, Paderborn, 2023).

Cornelius Borck

Cornelius Borck has been head of the Institute for the History of Medicine and Science Research at the University of Lübeck since 2007 and is spokesman for the Center for Cultural Studies Research there. After studying medicine, philosophy, religious studies and medical history in Hamburg, Heidelberg and Berlin, he was a Karl Schädler Fellow at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin from 1998 to 2001. From 2002 to 2004 he headed the research group “Writing Life. Media Technology and the Sciences of Life 1800-1900” at Bauhaus University Weimar, from 2004 to 2007 Professor and Canada Research Chair in Philosophy and Language of Medicine at McGill University in Montreal. His research interests include the contemporary history of medicine; brain research between media technology and neurophilosophy; human-machine relations in art and science; aesthetics and epistemology of the experiment. He is a member of the Academy of Sciences in Hamburg and was editor of the Berichte zur Wissenschaftsgeschichte from 2008 to 2018.