{"id":10748,"date":"2026-02-18T12:23:20","date_gmt":"2026-02-18T17:23:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/?p=10748"},"modified":"2026-05-01T08:51:59","modified_gmt":"2026-05-01T12:51:59","slug":"kirk-wetters-yale-presents-on-hans-blumenberg","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/2026\/02\/18\/kirk-wetters-yale-presents-on-hans-blumenberg\/","title":{"rendered":"Kirk Wetters (Yale) presents on Hans Blumenberg"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On February 18, Kirk Wetters presented the annual Graduate Students lecture on the topic of “Hans Blumenberg\u2019s Claims: Toward the Reconstruction of a ‘Secularization Debate'”<\/p>\n\n\n\n

At the VII. congress of the German Philosophical Society (Allgemeine Gesellschaft f\u00fcr Philosophie in Deutschland), in M\u00fcnster in 1962 Hans Blumenberg delivered a paper which was the basis of his influential thesis on secularization in his 1966 monograph, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. Karl L\u00f6with, who attended Blumenberg\u2019s talk in M\u00fcnster, panned the 1966 book based on key quotes taken from the 1962 conference paper \u2013 quotes which L\u00f6with falsely but understandably took himself to be the target of, while Blumenberg initially understood himself as extending L\u00f6with\u2019s work. It was less a \u201csecularization debate\u201d than a collegial kerfuffle but strongly contributed to Blumenberg\u2019s sense that his work had been misunderstood. He went on to revise and significantly extend the 1966 secularization thesis into a book-length study on Secularization and Self-Assertion \u2013 the canonical version of the work, which only added further layers of complication. Meanwhile, ironically, the conference version of the thesis, which has been anthologized in German and in English, is admired today for its pithy style and because it presents Blumenberg\u2019s main claims in a concise and accessible way. But what are those claims, exactly? My talk will seek to show, based on the newly available drafts of the 1962 conference paper, how Blumenberg\u2019s work emerged, not as a single overarching thesis, but in a series of striking, brilliant, but also seemingly independent assertions, which failed to produce meaningful debate at the time. The reason for this, I will argue \u2013 to the extent that there was a single reason \u2013 may have been a more implicit critical claim: that the interdisciplinary space between theology and philosophy was barricaded, and the philosophers were on the wrong side.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"Kirk<\/figure>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On February 18, Kirk Wetters presented the annual Graduate Students lecture on the topic of “Hans Blumenberg\u2019s Claims: Toward the Reconstruction of a ‘Secularization Debate’” At the VII. congress of […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":786,"featured_media":10749,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"_tec_requires_first_save":true,"_EventAllDay":false,"_EventTimezone":"","_EventStartDate":"","_EventEndDate":"","_EventStartDateUTC":"","_EventEndDateUTC":"","_EventShowMap":false,"_EventShowMapLink":false,"_EventURL":"","_EventCost":"","_EventCostDescription":"","_EventCurrencySymbol":"","_EventCurrencyCode":"","_EventCurrencyPosition":"","_EventDateTimeSeparator":"","_EventTimeRangeSeparator":"","_EventOrganizerID":[],"_EventVenueID":[],"_OrganizerEmail":"","_OrganizerPhone":"","_OrganizerWebsite":"","_VenueAddress":"","_VenueCity":"","_VenueCountry":"","_VenueProvince":"","_VenueState":"","_VenueZip":"","_VenuePhone":"","_VenueURL":"","_VenueStateProvince":"","_VenueLat":"","_VenueLng":"","_VenueShowMap":false,"_VenueShowMapLink":false,"_tribe_blocks_recurrence_rules":"","_tribe_blocks_recurrence_description":"","_tribe_blocks_recurrence_exclusions":"","footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"program":[10445],"class_list":["post-10748","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","program-german"],"acf":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10748","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/786"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=10748"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10748\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":10864,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/10748\/revisions\/10864"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/10749"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=10748"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=10748"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=10748"},{"taxonomy":"program","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/krieger.jhu.edu\/modern-languages-literatures\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/program?post=10748"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}