Heidegger’s Ontology of Events

• Critically examines Heidegger’s concept of ‘Ereignis’ or ‘event’ and his arguments for the view that ‘being’ should be reconceptualised as ‘event’
• Proposes a new methodology for reconstructing Heidegger’s philosophy: diagenic analysis
• Argues that we find two important concepts of event in Heidegger’s philosophy, not merely one as most commentators have held
• Shows how these concepts of event offer a framework for better understanding and responding to human alienation in the contemporary world
• Argues that Heidegger’s theory of events supports a form of ontological realism, not an anti-realist ‘correlationism’ as suggested by Meillassoux and Sheehan

James Bahoh proposes a new methodology for explaining Heidegger’s philosophy: diagenic analysis. This approach solves a set of interpretive problems that have stymied previous approaches to his difficult later work and led to substantial inconsistencies in the available scholarship. Using it, Bahoh reconstructs Heidegger’s concept of event in relation to his theories of history, truth, difference, ground and time-space.

In these contexts, Bahoh argues that Heidegger’s logic of events entails a logic of difference that is prior to and constitutive for the logic of identity essential to traditional metaphysics. The logic of events explains the generation of ontological structures grounding individuated finite domains – that is, it explains the generation of the logic of worlds of beings.