Evolution and palaeoanthropology in Hans Blumenberg’s Nachlaß

Abstract

Hans Blumenberg wrote, in an unpublished manuscript entitled Ein Betrug? / Der böse Dämon (UNF 532-534), that «the whole world and human intelligence were hidden beneath the earth, where the relics of the precursors of life rest». The German philosopher was not a palaeoanthropologist in the strict sense but dedicated much of his life to excavating in the ground, in search of replies to the great questions about the human condition. This paper is the result of a work compiling and classifying a series of unpublished texts about palaeoanthropology to be found dotted throughout his Nachlaß. The aim is to show the interest that disciplines such as palaeoanthropology aroused in the German thinker, and that his understanding of the matter, reflected in part in his anthropological-philosophical theses, has not yet been systematised.