Bloomsbury The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory (New Directions in German Studies)

This is the first translation into English, with annotations and a critical introduction, of Hans Blumenberg's The Laughter of the Thracian Woman. Blumenberg's book describes the reception history of an anecdote, found in Plato's Theatetus dialogue, wherein the early astronomer and proto-philosopher Thales of Miletus observes the stars while walking one night, until, failing to see a well in front of him, he tumbles down-perhaps to his death. A Thracian servant-girl laughs at how he tried to see what was above him without noticing what was right in front of his nose. This story and its variants recur in texts by Diogenes Laertius, then by Church Fathers Tertullian and Eusebius, Medieval and Renaissance-era preachers, Enlightenment figures Voltaire, Montaigne, Bacon, and Kant, and later by Feuerbach, Nietzsche, Heidegger, and Blumenberg's own colleagues. Whether the philosopher citing this anecdote sympathizes with Thales' priorities or chastises his negligence, Blumenberg shows how the story stands in for the unknowable history leading up to the intellectual attitude now known as 'theory.' This improbable story fills the gap to greater satisfaction than a philosophical claim would, precisely because it is malleable. The story can express various philosophers' subjective attitudes about which passions are worth falling for and which mistakes are absurd enough to laugh at. By retelling the anecdote, philosophers reveal their distinctive values regarding absorption in curiosity, philosophy's past, and the demand that theorists abide by sanctioned methods and procedures. The Laughter of the Thracian Woman: A Protohistory of Theory implicitly relies on Blumenberg's theory of metaphor. He locates the metaphors most beloved among generations of philosophers, and then, by observing their historically changing meanings, he shows how these have become indispensable to philosophy as metaphors, that is, as representations whose meanings remain undefined. Review "This English translation of Das Lachen der Thrakerin, the original German of which first appeared with Suhrkamp in 1987, will no doubt intensify the impression among anglophone readers that Blumenberg is a decidedly historical and literary philosopher whose own thinking emerges from an almost obsessive level of engagement with the minutiae of Western intellectual history, including the genre of the philosophical anecdote ... Like many of Blumenberg's works, Das Lachen der Thrakerin demands a lot of the reader: a detailed knowledge of the Western tradition, not only of philosophy, but of letters in general, from the Presocratics to the present; and patience with an argumentative method which revels in the detours and the details, and which is thin on orienting summaries (here the highly informative Afterword and scholarly apparatus provided by Hawkins offer much historical context and orientation)." --Modern Language Review"In its sweeping scope and singular focus, Hans Blumenberg's The Laughter of the Thracian Woman provides a monadic history of how to read the beginning of thinking as located precisely at the nexus of storytelling and reflection, literature and philosophy. In Blumenberg's series of relentless reconstructions and analyses, the telling and re-telling of the anecdote of Thales falling into a well - over and over again, from Plato to Heidegger, accompanied by the Thracian woman's laughter - comes to form the central image for the tension within philosophy between theoretical reflection and intuitive insight." --Paul Fleming, Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Director, Institute for German Cultural Studies (IGCS), Cornell University, USA"Hans Blumenberg stands as one of the most important and innovative thinkers of the twentieth century. As a philosopher, historian of science, and literary scholar, his work has made indispensable contributions to a broad range of fields across the Humanities and the Social Sciences. Thi