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.