Interrogating Modernity returns to Hans Blumenberg's epochal The Legitimacy of the Modern Age as a springboard to interrogate questions of modernity, secularisation, technology and political legitimacy in the fields of political theology, history of ideas, political theory, art theory, history of philosophy, theology and sociology. That is, the twelve essays in this volume return to Blumenberg's work to think once more about how and why we should value the modern. Written by a group of leading international and interdisciplinary researchers, this series of responses to the question of the modern put Blumenberg into dialogue with other twentieth, and twenty-first century theorists, such as Arendt, Bloch, Derrida, Husserl, Jonas, Latour, Voegelin, Weber and many more. The result is a repositioning of his work at the heart of contemporary attempts to make sense of who we are and how we¿ve got here.

Agata Bielik-Robson is a Professor of Jewish Studies at the University of Nottingham, UK and at the Institute of Philosophy and Sociology of the Polish Academy of Sciences in Warsaw, Poland. Her publications include The Saving Lie. Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (2011), Judaism in Contemporary Thought. Traces and Influence (co-edited with Adam Lipszyc, 2014), Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos (2014), and Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (2019). 

Daniel Whistler is Reader in Modern European Philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. His publications include The Schelling-Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801: Nature and Identity (2020), The Edinburgh Critical History of Nineteenth-Century Theology (2017) and After the Postmodern and the Postsecular: News Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion (2010).

Part I: Overcoming Gnosticism.- 1. I Hurt, Therefore I Am: Descartes with Blumenberg (and Job).- 2. Legitimacy of Nihilism: Blumenberg's Post-Gnosticism.- 3. Blumenberg, Latour and the Apocalypse.- Part II: Political Theologies of Modernity.- 4. The Sovereignity of the World: Towards a Political Theology of Modernity (After Blumenberg).- 5. Interrogating John Locke and the Propriety of Appropriation with Blumenberg and Voegelin.- 6. Political Legitimacy and Founding Myths.- Part III: Competing Visions of Modernity.- 7. Trial and Crisis: Blumenberg and Husserl on the Genesis and Meaning of Modern Science.- 8. Infinite Progress and the Burdens of Biography.- 9. The Ideal of Optics and the Opacity of Life: Blumenberg on Modernity and Myth.-  Part IV: Modernity and Method.- 10. World-Modelling and Cartesian Method: Blumenberg's Hyperopia.- 11. Umbesetzung: Reoccupation in Blumenbergian Modernity.- 12. Modernising Blumenberg.