publication, in 1966, of his Die Legitimitiit der Neuzeit The Legitimacy ofthe Modern Age (my translation ofwhich was published by MIT Press in 1984). In German philosophically oriented scholarship, in period since 1960s, series of major works that Blumenberg has published are comparable, for both path-breaking originality and widely recognized importance, only to works ofJiirgen Habermas. Having a broader interest in history of ideas than Habermas has (a breadth that is evident, for example, in his elaborate analysis of historical nexus between medieval Christianity and modernity in The Legitimacy of Modern Age), and with a bent that tends (outside philosophy) more toward literature than toward social theory and politics (though he also touches on these), Blumenberg has a great deal to offer to anyone who wants to undertand relations between thought and imagination that are manifested in modern literature, as well as in modern philosophy. Especially important in this respect is his Arbeit am Mythos (1979) Work on Myth, of which following piece, To Bring Myth to an End, is a chapter. (The complete translation will be published by MIT Press in 1985.) The book's title refers to creative work that has been expended on mythical stories and motifs by writers in Western tradition ever since Homer, work that continues with, if anything, even increased intensity in most recent couple of centuries of that tradition (centuries from which Blumenberg draws much of his illustrative material). The book's purpose is to determine what such work can mean in an age like modern one, which ostensibly has disabused itself of myth, alongwith fairy-tales, dogma, and prejudice in general, in order to turn its attention strictly to the facts of human circumstances and what one chooses to make of them. At beginning of To Bring Myth to an End Blumenberg describes Fontenelle's sur-