Miklos Nyiro

In the preface to a volume publishing the materials of a conference, it is still permissible, and perhaps even appropriate for the chair of the editorial board — who, in this case, is also the conference’s founder — to mention and explain what led him to choose the conference’s theme, what considerations shaped his decision regarding the selection of the topic. Although the fact that the concept of the ‘event’ had become one of the most important themes in postwar European thought would have been reason enough in itself to organize a conference titled EVENT and Its Mediation, this was not the only motive behind my decision. There was more to that choice, something that dated back many years. While rereading the magnum opus of Heidegger and that of Gadamer — being committed to hermeneutic philosophy — at one point I realized that both Being and Time and Truth and Method mention the so-called ‘medial’ form or sense of verbs, and they do so in contexts no less significant than the descriptions of the very concepts of ‘phenomenon’ and ‘play’, respectively. Heidegger writes: “The Greek expression φαινόμενον, to which the term ‘phenomenon’ goes back, is derived from the verb φαίνεσθαι, which signifies “to show itself”. [...]. φαίνεσθαι itself is a middle-voiced form [eine mediale Bildung] which comes from φαίνω—to bring to the light of day, to put in the light.”1 Gadamer, for his part, emphasizes that play and playing have a medial sense. He reiterates twice that “the primordial sense of playing is the medial one [der mediale Sinn]”, and he also speaks repeatedly about “the medial sense of play” itself.2 These formulations clearly refer to the linguistic phenomenon of μεσότης (mesotes, middle voice), which is well known to those familiar with ancient Greek language and culture, and so these philosophers do not even go into detail to explain its meaning. People today, however — especially speakers of the major living Indo-European languages, which have undergone unique historical developments — generally find it unfamiliar and difficult to grasp. I believe that not merely is the phenomenon of middle voice itself quite remarkable. What is particularly noteworthy is the fact that the meaning it conveys has been mostly forgotten. Therefore, it is especially important to explain why it has fallen into oblivion, what are the cultural and linguistic tendencies that have caused the ‘medial sense’ — as embodied by the middle voice — to fade into the background. During my research, a few things became clear to me: The phenomenon classified by Greek linguists as mesotes is much more widespread and, at the same time, much older than the ancient Greek language; it is generally of fundamental importance within the Proto-Indo- European languages themselves, and can also be found in numerous other primordial languages. Nevertheless, its interpretation is disputed among linguists and historians of language. According to the influential interpretation of the renowned comparative linguist Emil Benveniste, however, which is carried out at an appropriate level of abstraction, the middle voice is — broadly speaking — used to express a situation where something or someone is being led by the very course of the process or event in which they are involved and to which they are sub-ject. Thus, the middle voice always implies an event, as well as a specific sense of ‘participatory agency’. Specifically, it is precisely from the perspective of such event that the middle voice defines or describes the entity or agent that participates in it, in full accordance with Gadamer’s phenomenological characterization of play and the player. All of this, then, points to an ‘event-medial worldview’, in which events, rather than substances or subjects, are considered primary, while the latter are understood in terms of their involvement in ‘pure events’ that occur without causes or agents, which thus serve as their medium or element. Such a worldview stands in sharp contrast to both the worldview propagated by today’s major Western Indo-European languages — in which the active- passive opposition, and thus the juxtaposition of agent and patient, dominates — and to Cartesian subject-object dualism, which is but the philosophical fixation and systematization of the former. I also believe that hermeneutic philosophy can best be understood from the perspective of such a concept of ‘event-mediality’. This, in turn, clearly places it within the context of recent philosophies of the event, in which the middle voice and related phenomena are also recurring themes. The task at hand, therefore, was to survey the wide range of philosophies of events that have emerged in great numbers in recent times and, in a broader sense, all those approaches from other disciplines that are in some way related to the concept of the event. This is how the conference’s theme came about. Below, the Esteemed Reader will find a selection of papers presented at the international interdisciplinary conference titled EVENT and Its Mediation. Philosophical, Philological, Religious Studies, Literary and Cultural Theoretical Perspectives (September 1–4, 2025, Miskolc, Hungary). The submitted papers are written, expanded, and revised versions of the twenty-minute session presentations. Selected papers underwent a double editorial review process as described in the Editorial Review Statement, based on which the authors revised their manuscripts, if necessary, through multiple rounds of editorial consultation. During the selection process, only those submissions that met the academic and editorial standards were included in the volume.