The significance of Heidegger’s engagement with poetry reaches beyond his remarks on poetic texts and the role of poetic composition, whether we consider his lecture courses on Hölderlin, his reflections on Greek tragedy, or his later essays on language and poetry. His view of Dichtung cannot be categorized under the rubrics of philosophical aesthetics, hermeneutics, phenomenological theory of art, or literary interpretation, as his unique investment in poetry and his idiomatic approach to Dichtung have in view a transformation of thought: a preparation of a non-metaphysical style of thinking, characterized by a new, non-conceptual rigor, which can be called “poietic.” Sketching this “other” thinking against the backdrop of the then most current techno-scientific developments, whether in cybernetics, physics or genetics, Heidegger insists on its preliminary scope and preparatory character. That is why the importance of Dichten in Heidegger’s work, especially its role in taking philosophy toward an otherwise to thinking can only be properly appreciated when we give its due to the “poetic” valence of his texts, which includes innovative textual composition, the syntactical and lexical texture of writing, its typographical experiments and verbal inventions, etymological explorations, and the inventive use of hyphens or quasi-tautological syntactic phrasing.

Chapter 1 introduces the major themes of the book. I argue that the idea of divine revelation does not make much sense in the contemporary world, because it is primarily thought about in terms of beliefs rather than experience. Philosophically, experience is (i) what happens at the point of opening in the world, which is a given instance of life, as well as (ii) conscious reflection on that experience as it is lived. For both senses of the word, using a hermeneutic-phenomenological methodology, it is possible to speak of prepredicative experience – that is, what takes place (or 'events') prior to thematisation in language. I argue that it is the prepredicative sense of experience that is engaged in revelation. This is because God cannot be made an 'object' of experience. Now, since in modern life, the word ‘belief’ risks coming to mean simply what is untrue or subjective, it is no longer very helpful in communicating something about God. In contrast, 'the event' can be used to consider the possibility of encountering a God who reveals Godself in person. To conclude the introduction, I set out how my argument about experience and the 'event' is carried through each chapter.

Chapter 7 considers how the event has been characterised in philosophy and the implications for theology. Concerned that opposition to it is generated by fear that it simply (re)asserts theistic beliefs, I examine how Marion’s understanding of the event can legitimately engage with the thought of others. Jean Grondin's views illustrate one extreme of that engagement. Caputo's analysis of the opposition between intuition and intention illustrates a need to discern whether a phenomenological approach to the event is being undertaken on the basis of theistic or atheistic beliefs, or whether a point earlier to that distinction is envisaged. Jean-Luc Nancy 's event takes place prepredicatively and it is cast in terms of an empty intentionality of faith. I suggest that this is reminiscent of hyperphasis. I look to Lieven Boeve to see how such a radical apophatics might work theologically. Boeve dialogues with Jean-François Lyotard, who thinks the event in terms of its emptiness and givenness to feeling. I then consider how Claude Romano thinks the event as prepredicative, and I use his criteria to discern whether a philosophical reading of the event would preclude a theological application.

In Chapter 8 I examine Lacoste's study of affective experience and consider the possibility that God might be recognised in the affect as an event. For Lacoste, God’s presence to affection takes place in moods rather than feelings. The recognition that God has passed in experience is always subject to self-deception and must be tested against the tradition of the believing community. Revelation and truth are connected by means of Augustine's reversal: when it comes to God, we do not love what we first know but know what we first love. This attends to the paradox that occurs in the reception of phenomena appearing only to freedom – paradoxical phenomena appear as credible rather than indubitable and are open to acceptance or rejection. For Lacoste, such phenomenality ‘cannot be perceived without our decision to see it’ and begins in ‘an experience formed in the element of non-self-evidence’. It arouses love; it is the experience of love that first draws the 'believer'. Revelation touches experience in an encounter that is felt before it is known. Prepredicative, signifying by way of moods rather than feelings, the revelatory encounter is primarily relational rather than doctrinal.

In Chapter 6, I introduce hermeneutic phenomenology as a philosophical method relating to the description and interpretative analysis of experience. French phenomenology has become a dialogue partner for theology and religion because of its capacity to accommodate what might be given without appearing as such. For Marion, this opens the possibility of recognising phenomena that signify in excess of or counter to experience, including phenomena of r/Revelation. After sketching Marion's typology of saturated phenomena and considering some of the criticism that has emerged in response, I observe his deepening insight that the phenomenality of the event characterises each of the counter-experiences he describes, and so has a particular importance. If what exceeds intentionality is described in terms of the event rather than as a phenomenon of revelation, we avoid the difficulties of the r/Revelation distinction that Marion draws, and decrease the sense that revelation is being smuggled into phenomenology. I also note that the event is a figure used more broadly in contemporary thought and so enables us to connect Marion’s work with that of others in potentially fruitful dialogue.

In the final chapter, I examine the question of revelation by looking again at the Emmaus story. In the generally accepted reading of this text, it is a story about moving from blindness to sight. I argue that the event of revelation is more nuanced than this reading allows. God is revealed to the disciples in the event of their burning hearts on the road, in a presence in the affect to which they only advert afterwards (Lacoste). The disciples personally recognise Jesus in the event of the breaking of the bread, in the saturated phenomenon of his appearing and disappearing (using the tools of Marion, otherwise). And Cleopas and his companion reveal the God of Jesus Christ in the event of their joyful witness to the other disciples back in Jerusalem, and in their personal transformation (Romano). That divine revelation might be one of the possibilities of a hermeneutic of the event allows sufficient ambivalence between the immanent and the transcendent to accommodate readings that might sometimes be plausible either way. Learning to discern the movements of the affect takes seriously, however, the possibility that God reveals Godself in experience through a love that appears to freedom.

A predication prototypically predicates an event. Events have multiple participants in their semantic frame. Some participants are more central than others. The information packaging of event participants construes certain participants as core arguments and others as oblique arguments. Transitivity constructions are defined in terms of the prototypical expression of central participants as core argument phrases. ‘Subject’ and ‘object’ are defined crosslinguistically in terms of degree of topicality (salience) and force dynamics (subject acting on object). Basic argument encoding strategies are flagging, indexation, and word order. An exemplar approach to defining transitive constructions is taken, using the agentive change of state event of breaking as the exemplar event, following Haspelmath. Subject generally precedes verb and object in word order. Variation in alignment is based on the system of transitive and intransitive constructions, in terms of which core argument of the transitive construction the intransitive argument aligns with, including the rare case where the core arguments of intransitive constructions are split between transitive subject and object.

This chapter reviews the current landscape of ontological and lexical resources that motivated the development of the Rich Event Ontology (REO). Aimed at a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts, REO functions as a conceptual organization of event types that facilitates mapping between FrameNet, VerbNet, and the Entities, Relations, and Events corpus annotation from the Linguistic Data Consortium.

theory of art in the conventional sense. He does not provide a systematic account of art, nor does he provide criteria for aesthetic judgment. He is concerned rather with the role art plays in forming our culture and its meaning in our individual and communal lives. This chapter situates Gadamer’s views in the context of the history of philosophy–the ancient Greek view of art and the modern views of art, especially the view of Kant. For Gadamer, art is an event of understanding. The concepts of play and the game are important to his account. This chapter considers the temporal, the dialogical, and the communal aspects of art for Gadamer. It considers arts claim to truth. And finally, it shows how Gadamer thinks that art has an important transformative potential.

Gadamer’s hermeneutics is concerned with the experience of understanding that takes place in living language. Living language is a matter of conversation and dialogue. Conversation and dialogue always take place in a living language within the historical context of a tradition. Gadamer’s hermeneutics challenges philosophy’s usual focus on the logic of statements. This is a profoundly Socratic-Platonic idea. The world is presented in language as a communicative event which is dialogical. The dialectic of the word in hermeneutics has a speculative structure.

Measuring behaviour means assigning numbers to observations of behaviour according to specified rules. Converting a stream of behaviour into behavioural metrics involves choosing and defining specific categories of behaviour that can be measured. Behavioural categories can be described in terms of their physical structure or their consequences. An ethogram is a catalogue of the species-typical behavioural categories displayed by a species in a specified environment. Descriptions of behavioural categories should be unambiguous and written down before data collection starts. Behavioural categories can be designated as either events (short duration) or states (longer duration). Behavioural categories are used to generate metrics such as latencies, frequencies, durations and intensities. Two or more metrics can be combined to form a composite metric. Metrics can be at different levels of measurement, ranging from nominal (weakest) to ratio (strongest).

Solidarity is founded in violence and bears the signs of violence, and revolt. The beginning/creation of community in innumerable foundational myths is a terrible killing. According to whether this killing is of the father or the brother, the chapter suggests that solidarity is either hierarchical, and geared towards those strictly understood as children of the father, or fraternal, in the sense of geared towards the stranger, the non-brother. These solidarities sometimes exist in combined forms within the same foundational myth. In the socio-political imaginary concatenation that Europe is right now, different types of solidarity constantly co-exist and sometimes clash with each other. Revolt is violence-in-solidarity and it reconciles different sorts of debt, different conceptions of time, that is, it allows for simultaneity of the event (or suspension of time, which happens in the area of the sacred, the religious, the Durkheimian mechanic) and the historical, continuous flow of time (which happens in the area of the reasonable, the Durkheimian organic).