Introduction: Reflections on the Fiftieth Anniversary of Hans Blumenberg's <i>The Legitimacy of the Modern Age</i>.

This collection celebrates the semicentennial of the publication of Hans Blumenberg's The Legitimacy of the Modern Age. The question that inspired Blumenberg may continue to provoke readers today, when challenges to secularism have emerged both in academic discourse and in political life: Can modernity ground its own normativity without appealing to the religious past? Or must we abandon the attempt to seek a rational grounding for modern norms? Is secularism still valid as a political framework and as a cognitive and moral ideal, or is it mistaken to believe in the independence or "self-assertion" of secular modernity?