After accounting for the holiday festival as a philosophical theme across Heidegger’s early to later writings, this paper summarizes the 1943 “Andenken” essay on Hölderlin’s “wedding festival” and 1959 “Hölderlin’s Earth and Heaven” essay on the “round dance.” It then explores how these motifs of the wedding and its round dance are in play in the 1936/7 Contributions to Philosophy: Of the Event manuscript, especially in its philosophy of attunement, and notion of the “celebration of the last god.”

Much has been written about Heidegger's various influences on Gadamer's thinking, especially as the latter culminates in Truth and Method. Scholars often point to the way Heidegger's notions of “thrownness” and “historicity” in Being and Time (BT) influence Gadamer's insistence on the centrality of tradition for hermeneutical understanding, and his notions of the “fusion of horizons” (horizontverschmelzung) and the “hermeneutic circle.”1 But scholars have appeared to overlook, or at least underestimate, the influence some of Heidegger's other notions have exerted on Gadamer's thought. In this paper I want to address crucial aspects of this neglect; I shall explore the relation between Heidegger's notion, as he explains it in Introduction to Metaphysics (IM), of truth as unconcealment (aletheia), and compare it to Gadamer's notion, as he describes it in Truth and Method, of truth as emergent, in play (Spiel), from the event (Ereignis) of conversation and of the work of art.

Heidegger claims we are defined, not by what we are, but by the way we are what we are. But his concept of our ‘way’ of being is ambiguous and has given rise to four distinct readings of what he means. I draw upon recent work on kinds of genus-species relationships in order to disambiguate this concept and explain the unity and dependence-relations among the four extant readings of it. I argue that Heidegger’s main concern in the published portion of Being and Time is to explain what it takes for Dasein to be the entity that can understand its own way of being, not in this or that specific way, but rather, in general—that is, at all, as opposed to not at all.

In the Introduction to Being and Time Heidegger calls ‘To the things themselves’ the “maxim” of phenomenology. I argue that Heidegger recognized the maxim’s normativity but thought that Husserl’s understanding of it made it an inadequate guide for the phenomenological method. I show that Heidegger revised the maxim in his Marburg years with a focus on its role as a principle. The revised maxim specifies how to engage in phenomenological inquiry by calling the phenomenologist’s attention to the violence our fore-conceptions can do to the way phenomena show themselves. With this revised maxim in mind I reconsider the grounds of Heidegger’s critique of Husserl in the Marburg years, and explain his conclusion that Husserl’s phenomenology was unphenomenological. Finally, I show that Heidegger’s attempts to abide by his more rigorous maxim appear to fail.

The notion of event (Ereignis) that Heidegger introduces in the 1930s names a singularity as something that happens (geschehen), but cannot be repeated and cannot thus fall under a concept. The same holds for the notion of “other beginning,” which thus cannot be in continuity with the first beginning. I show that Heidegger uses two different descriptions of such an event: a messianic or diachronic one—something will happen, we are in transition toward it—and a synchronic one: the event permeates our ways of thinking now. I show that Michel Foucault’s understanding of “the event in thought” (l’événement dans la pensée) that he uses and applies in his Hermeneutics of the Subject can help us understand that the two aspects of the event—messianic and synchronic—are not contradictory, but belongs of necessity to a thinking of a singularity, as Heidegger practices it.

The paper argues that the second of Martin Heidegger’s Country Path Conversations (GA 77), namely, “Der Lehrer trifft den Türmer an der Tür zum Turmaufgang,” provides the reader with a live performance of a dialogue (much advocated by Heidegger) between a poet and a thinker. Through a textual analysis of various dramatic elements in the conversation, I provide an imaginative albeit plausible identification of the three characters in the dialogue (namely, the teacher, the tower warden, and the guest) that makes sense in light of the overall conversational context and opens new possibilities for the philosophical meaning of the conversation itself.

I argue that the analyses of language Heidegger offers in On the Way to Language demonstrate that language is both constitutively other to us and manifest to us as our historically specific possibilities of meaningful life. To do so, I argue that Heidegger’s focus on our experience of speaking demonstrates that we experience the alterity of language as an imperative, as questionable, and as perpetually ahead of us, and that these characteristics correspond to our ways of taking up meaningfully the possibilities of contemporary life available to us only in our collectively constituted, historical contexts. Further, I draw on Heidegger account of the experience of the poet who figures in Stefan George’s poem “Words” to argue that our experience of language is characterized by learning to criticize aspects of contemporary life. I also identify this practice of critique as essential to community, defining the latter as a collective attempt to preserve and transform possibilities of meaningful life.

Does Heidegger have an ethics of history? The very idea of an ethics of history, especially in regards to Heidegger’s work, appears to make little sense. For Heidegger, history is always the history of being, and, as we learn from the “Letter on Humanism,” the nature of ethics has yet to be fully determined. And yet, if we follow Heidegger is his way of determining the ethical in relation to *thos, we can in fact begin to speak of Heidegger’s ethics of history. Towards this end, I want to further interpret his characterization of *thos, especially as it is presented through the saying of Heraclitus, and extend the interpretation through the work of Giorgio Agamben.