The notion of event played no important role in the history of Western philosophy until the 20th century (perhaps the only exception being the Stoics). This philosophical tradition has mostly ascribed to events a secondary, derivative status: they have been conceived as modifications of the attributes of substances or subjects. Nietzsche, however, exposes such an interpretation as based on the “inferential schema” encoded in the grammar of Indo-European languages: the constraint of the subject-predicate structure of sentence construction gives rise to the interpretative pattern according to which every predicate presupposes a subject, and every process or event is a change in the predicate of a subject. Subsequent thought focusing on “relations” and “processes-becoming” also emerged largely in opposition to the Greek ontology of substance, to which the Cartesian subject-object dichotomy is an heir. Over the last century, however, it was the concept of “event” that has come to the forefront of interest in a wide variety of philosophical fields, within both the “continental” and the analytic philosophical traditions.

One of the basic continental fracture lines emerged as a conflict between Heidegger’s event-ontological endeavor, on the one hand, and the refusal of the very ontologizability of the event, on the other. Already in his early philosophical enterprise entitled “pre-theoretical science of origins”, the young Heidegger characterized the factical life of human being as a non-objectifiable “Ereignis”. In his main work, however, Heidegger comes to call the specific mobility of human life as the proper happening (Geschehen) of Being-there (Dasein), and regards events as merely “happening to the beings that exist in the world” and thus as belonging to the realm of actualities – not possibilities –, denying thereby their properly existential significance. This primacy of the “temporal-historical-evential” over against the “objective” – as expressed in the so-called ontological difference between Being and beings – led Heidegger to call the Greek doctrine of Being (conceived as “pure presence”) as the ontology of mere being-at-hand (Vorhandenheit), and to oppose to it his own temporal ontology, into which his late notion of Ereignis also belongs. In turn, among those who are skeptical of Heidegger’s pursuit of event-ontology, Romano, for example, criticizes Heidegger’s fundamental-ontology because the various “existentials” developed there ultimately prove to be "timeless" structural elements that capture human existence as self-contained, that is, immune to events. However, Romano’s examination of the phenomenality of events shows that proper events emerge an-archically, as origins in themselves, creating the horizon of their own intelligibility, thereby turning over and re-founding in its totality the world of their addressees. Accordingly, events – in their plurality – prove to be origins in a sense that precede Being; they constitute the radically non-subjective starting-point of all human understanding of the world, self, and historicity.

A remarkable feature of most of the continental event philosophies – as opposed to the analytic approaches, and even regardless of the disagreement concerning the ontologizability of the event – is that they strictly distinguish an event (Ereignis) from a process (Vorgang). While mere processes take place in countless contexts, a proper event always happens to someone who is irreplaceable in terms of its occurrence: the pro me element, that is, the correlation between an event and its addressee, is constitutive of a proper event. One telling way to conceive such a correlation can be found in Gadamer’s account for the event-like nature of understanding as it takes place in the experience of art, history, and the linguistically mediated world. Here Gadamer strives “to grasp [conceptually] what grips us” (“Begreifen, was uns ergreift” – Emil Staiger), that is, he is concerned with those cases where a self-transcending, ecstatic participation takes place in an event of meaning-formation. In such cases, the participants are grasped by, and therefore dissolute themselves in, an autonomous, self-contained, “medial” movement of play – or else, get engaged in a true dialogical involvement that is structurally akin to play – where the player’s dissolution in the movement amounts to a paradigmatic realization of the idea of a “medial agent” being led by the movement of a "medial event".

This idea of “mediality” is also exemplified in the linguistic phenomenon of the middle voice. Today this voice is primarily known from ancient Greek (as mesotes), since in the verbal systems of most of the Western languages (English, German, French, Spanish, etc.) the active-passive opposition predominates, so much so that the middle voice is morphologically not even distinct in these languages (yet – among others – the non-Indo-European Hungarian is also very rich of middle voiced verbs). In contrast, the verbal systems of the primordial Indo-European languages (Sanskrit, etc.) were dominated by the middle-active opposition (therefore, the semantic field of the middle voice cannot be traced back to any mixture of the active and passive voices). As Benveniste shows, both (middle and active) primordial voices expressed three aspects simultaneously: an event or process named by the verb; the sub-ject of the process; and the position of the sub-ject in relation to the process. It is this latter aspect in which the active and middle verbs differ. While the former expresses an activity of a sub-ject outside the process, the latter expresses the activity of a sub-ject inside the process: in the case of the middle voice “the subject is the center and at the same time the agent of the process; it performs what is performed in it [...] it is within the process of which it is the agent” (Benveniste). The ancient verbal systems therefore reflect a “medial world-view” in which the focus of attention falls on the very events or occurrences that happen to the various sub-jects, and in accordance with which – as if a kind of “medium or element” – the sub-jects “act”, either from inside, or from outside (far from being exclusive-sovereign agents). This medial understanding of the world apparently promotes a kind of “thinking in terms of verb and subject, event and agent”. In contrast, in the frame of the active-passive opposition – predominant in the Western languages – both voices express only two aspects: an action (no longer an event!) named by the verb, and a subject (without its localization!). This is a one-dimensional, linear view (subject → action → object), where in both voices the subject remains the focal point (as active or as sufferer), and conversely, the process named by the verb can be made intelligible from the point of view of the subject alone (as an “action” of some subject). Accordingly, the Western languages promote a kind of “thinking in terms of subject and object, agent and the object of its action”.

The idea of “medial agency” can be seen to have important yields for deconstructing both the ideas of “subjectivity”, “free will” and the “sovereign agent” underlying it; and the kind of moral “responsibility” attached to them (pointing toward an “alternate responsibility” [from the Latin alter {another, second}], as opposed to the modern consequentialist responsibility ethics [Max Weber, Hans Jonas]). On a larger scale, however, the contrast between the worldviews promoted by the primordial Indo-European languages and the modern Western languages, respectively, suggest a historical hypothesis. According to that, the medial world-view was still predominant in classical Greek culture and in the Hellenistic period, and it is also discernible in several aspects of Christian mediaeval culture (in the role of the concepts of event and “medial experience” in Christian theology in general, and in the religious experience of Christian mystics in particular; that of middle voice in the Bible, etc.). However, the medial understanding of the world went through a definite decline in modern times, as directly reflected in the fact that from Hegel onwards the focus shifted from homo ludens to homo laborans (and further evidenced by the exclusive place of the concepts of activity and passivity taken in the history of the doctrine of categories, and generally in many modern philosophical approaches, obfuscating the mediality of middle voice; also by the exclusive place of the concepts of causality and intentionality in entire philosophical traditions; etc.).

The fundamentally medial condition of humans is coupled with their mediating ingeniousity. Starting from Gadamerian considerations on play, in fact, it is possible to see in culture the proper sphere of human existence, that “second nature” that is the environment or habitat in which it is inserted. This environment is structured according to directions of meaning (language, habitus, artistic productions, etc.) and technological apparatuses (tools, complex technical devices, up to contemporary digital technologies). The decline of the medial conception of culture in modern times prompts a renewed study of the role of play in the ongoing formation of culture, including the conditions of our contemporary digital world. Furthermore, insofar as events and their mediation by cultural techniques play a crucial role in the processes of meaning-formation, such techniques are also to be examined from diverse (historical, linguistic, political theoretical, biopoetical, etc.) aspects. However, the vindication of the symbolic (i.e. medial, connective: the Greek symbolon is derived from symballo, “to connect”) character of technical objects – as constitutive of the very process of hominisation – is desirable, too, in order to maintain a “technological humanism” that can avoid both the demonisation of technology and its uncritical exaltation.

• Reconstructions of and critical engagements with past continental approaches to the concept of event (Bergson, Whitehead, Heidegger, Gadamer, Blanchot, Badiou, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Derrida, Marion, Nancy, Richir, Malabou, Romano, Tengelyi, etc.).
• Contributions to a conceptual history / typology of the different event concepts.
• Analysis of the metaphysical, ontological, phenomenological, and socio-critical dimensions of the event.
• The phenomenality, temporality, and the space-binding aspects of the event.
• The subjective aspect of the experience of the event (linking the concept of event with the subjective processes of genetic phenomenology, the problems of language, the unconscious, and the existential).
• Study of various instances of “medial agency” (as a full-fleged agent being sub-jected to events) and “medial dispositions”.
• Consequences of event-philosophies for our understanding of the modes of human responsibility, personhood, and moral identity.

• Reconstructions of and critical engagements with past analytic approaches to the concept of event (Davidson, Quine, Kim, etc.).
• The basic metaphysical structure of events (concrete particulars, abstract entities, hybrid nature, ontologically simple); the metaphysical constituents of events; the role of participants, time, and properties in defining an event.
• The individuating criteria of events (over time, across different contexts, different possible worlds); the role causation and spatiotemporal regions, respectively, play in individuating events; issues of negative causes and negative events; issues of overlapping or nested events.
• How do events fit into broader ontological categories, or do they constitute a sui generis one; are events fundamentally different from objects, states of affairs, or facts; do all events involve changes of some sort, or there are static events?
• Related topics from other analytic fields: action-theory (e. g., human actions as events, different from mere happenings and bodily movements); philosophy of mind (e. g., distinct mental events’ relation to physical events in the outer world and in the brain); philosophy of language (e. g., the role of linguistic elements – verbs, tenses, adverbs, etc. – in event semantics, and the way they alter the conceptualization of events).

• Philologically demonstrable instances that support the hypothesis of the “medial” nature of the ancient worldview, or its decline.
• The semantics of middle voice, and the ways humans perceived it in cognitive terms.
• The Greek perception in grammatical literature (so in ancient science) affecting the Latin and medieval thought.
• Aspects of change of the verbal systems over the ages of the language and cultural developments.
• The relation of middle voice to the passive in different languages.
• Comparison of the middle voice and the so-called ergative structure (in Basque, Georgian, Mayan, Tibetan, etc.)

• What is an “event” in religion; what are the foundational events of a religion and why?
• How, by what events, is the history of God interconnected with the history of the world?
• What is the (transcendental) significance of ritual events?
• What are the tokens of a mystical event in the several religions of mankind?
• The relation between “medial disposition” and religiosity: is there a sense in which a religious believer is neither active nor passive in a religious event; is the acceptance of the operation of divine grace a “medial” event; is the religious experience of mystics a medial experience?
• Traces of the “medial worldview” in diverse aspects of Christian medieval, and any other cultures.
• The religious significance of the Greek middle voice (mesotes) in the Bible.

• The cultural transition from homo ludens to homo laborans and its implications on cultural identity, alienation, and reification.
• Study of the concept of play and its role in the formation of culture (Huizinga, Nietzsche, Heidegger, Fink, Gadamer, Derrida, Winnicott, Dewey, etc.).
• Play in the contemporary digital world: risks and opportunities.
• The “medial” role of tools and techniques in the formation of the cultural environment.
• The symbolic character of technical objects: the origin of symbolization, technique and the process of hominisation (Leroi-Gourhan, Stiegler, Simondon, etc.), meaning and loss of meaning in the technological world.

• Medial cultural techniques that make visible, even generate events through a – symbolic or analogue, more recently digital – recording (cf. Kittler) or through representation.
• Mediality creating the event, and the event “using” mediality, displacing its conventional or pre-coded forms of being.
• Language as a performative medium or a medium for performativity.
• The limits of language arrived at in or from the event, and the finitude of event manifested from language.
• Biopoetics of the event as manifested in literary texts.
• Natural history (Naturgeschichte) as a category of event in literature.
• The linguistic event between singularity and iterability, performativity and virtual embodiment.
• The corporeal, embodiment modes of the event with anthropological implications (Agamben, etc.).
• The event inscribed in public structures (because of its mediality) and its latency.