HANS BLUMENBERG PHÄNOMENOLOGISCHE SCHRIFTEN Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 2018. ISBN 9783518587218

The review presents the central ideas of the Phenomenological Writings of the modern German philosopher H. Blumenberg. The main issue of this review is to clarify the general positions in the method of Blumenberg; his critics of the phenomenology of E. Husserl and to show the role of Phenomenological Writings in the corpus of Blumenberg's works. The main focus is to identify the significance of metaphorology and anthropology for Blumenberg's phenomenological approach. One of the most important ideas of Blumenberg's research is the problem of finite human consciousness. He reinterprets consciousness in the context of its “factuality,” depending on the specific historical human existence. In this regard, Blumenberg criticizes the phenomenological problems of evidence and objectivity, underlines the role of “non-obvious,” incomplete and other forms of negativity in human experience. Consciousness, according to Blumenberg, along with such spheres as the world, time or the Other cannot be given in its immediate presence, therefore it requires metaphorical means of description. The life world is also described by means of metaphors that can be found in E. Husserl's phenomenological language itself—in the metaphor of the soil or horizon. These topics reveal the meaning of the earlier project Paradigms for Metaphorology by G. Blumenberg and his initial interest in the symbolic, incomplete means of describing human consciousness and life. Further clarification of the anthropological dimension of phenomenology is carried out in the context of intersubjectivity problems. The concept of intersubjectivity, from the point of view of Blumenberg, is necessary not so much to justify the criteria of the objectivity of the world, as to reveal the boundaries of human consciousness in the experience of the Other. The conclusion of the review presents Blumenberg's interpretation of the phenomenological method as a special “life practice” that can cross the boundaries of the principle of evidence and include such areas as paradox, hypothesis and incompleteness in understanding the activity of consciousness.