Difficulties with the philosophy of history (1973) can be considered as the main key to understanding not only the origins but also the subsequent evolution of the work of Odo Marquard; opens this kind of writing, tinged with a sense of humor and desire for clarity, which owes much of Heine and Kierkegaard as Montaigne and the French moralists confesses. Not surprisingly this collection of articles written between 1962 and 1973 sets the exhibition model, able to reconcile the grave with light ( "transcendental literature"), who consecrated him in Germany as master of speculative short story. The comprehensive set of notes accompanying this book should not forget that we are dealing rather with an intellectual autobiography that recounts the experience of estrangement from a skeptical philosopher (defender of the plurality of myths and cautious against any faith in absolutes ) for utopias in May 68 monomyth betting on the History of total emancipation. The immediate context of these polemical reflections thus refers to these attempts at revolution were limited to practice a kind of "retrospective disobedience" if during the twelve years of National Socialism submission to the tyrant was almost unanimous, now under protection rule of law, the great rejection is preached and shipped to the Federal Republic of Germany on suspicion of fascism. From a hermeneutical and anthropological Marquard man he is for a finite being that needs to compensate for deficiencies and link with traditions. Our life is so short that we do not have enough time to transform or substantiate it all from scratch. Marquard's thesis is that modernity is spoiled in the philosophy of history, the salvific function makes it rather at the forefront of anti-modernity.

Odo Marquard (1928), currently professor emeritus at the University of Giessen and member of the Academy of Language and Poetry in Darmstadt, is one of the most lucid and irreverent thinkers call "skeptical generation". Having suffered in childhood imprisonment in a Nazi boarding school and a brief experience of captivity as a teenage soldier, intellectually Marquard began to form immediately after the war; he studied from 1947 to 1954 philosophy, German studies and theology in Münster and Freiburg under the direction of his main teacher Joachim Ritter and his doctorate in 1954 with a job that would become his debut: Method skeptical about Kant (1958,).
In 1963 he was fitted with an investigation that attempted to show how psychoanalysis represented the continuation of German idealism by disenchanted media and published years later under the title of transcendental idealism, the romantic nature philosophy, psychoanalysis (1987). His pieces of "transcendental literature" have earned him recognition as the Sigmund Freud Prize for scientific prose (1984) or Ernst Robert Curtius Prize (1996) by the set of his essays.
His works include: Difficulties with the philosophy of history (1973), Farewell to the beginning (1981), Apology of the contingent (1986), Aesthetics and anestética (1989), Happiness in Unhappiness (1995) and Philosophy compensation (2000). And its most recent contributions (Skepticism as a philosophy of finitude and Guy and division of powers, which appeared in 2002 and 2004 respectively) have confirmed how the brevity of life incites to doubt everything fundamentalism and concoct a thousand and one stories to confront the threat of death.