Past Fellows at the Institute of International Studies

Reinhard Bendix Memorial Research Fellow, 2000-2001

Anna Wertz, History: Blumenberg's Worlds: An Intellectual Biography of Hans Blumenberg. The late Hans Blumenberg (1920-1996) was a philosopher, historian, and public intellectual. Well-known in his native Germany, Blumenberg has not received the attention he deserves in the English-speaking world. Ms. Wertz's dissertation, therefore, serves as an introduction of Blumenberg's theoretical ideas to an Anglo-American audience. One of the main goals of Blumenberg's research in history, philosophy, and philology was to explore the reliance of the modern world on theoretical speculation arising from Nominalism in the late Middle Ages that destroyed human faith in an inherently ordered cosmos. In working out his thesis, Blumenberg made many scholarly contributions, not the least of which are careful exegetical studies of the theological debates of the Middle Ages, as well as explorations of the development of early modern science and philosophy. Blumenberg's emphasis on Nominalism also involved him in debates with the leading theologians and philosophers of his time about the connections between eschatology, philosophy, and history. Even more significant was Blumenberg's development of the "reoccupation thesis": a theory of epochal shift in which the questions left over from an old world view (in this case, Christianity), must be "reoccupied" by the answers of the new one (modern science and philosophy).