ABSTRACT
Claude Romano's version of hermeneutic phenomenology breaks with some of the most longstanding commitments of Edmund Husserl's and Martin Heidegger's thought. For according to Romano, the whole Stoic metaphysical infrastructure ends up "removing events from the horizon of ontology." To illustrate the phenomenological import of that reappraisal, Romano directs our attention to examples drawn from everyday life. An explication of the phenomena of birth and death attest to evential hermeneutics' radical break with the Heideggerian philosophy. The key marked difference between evential hermeneutics and fundamental ontology is that, although both articulate a view of selfhood as entwined with possibility, the origin and nature of that possibility differs. As Romano's analysis reveals, if anything separates evential hermeneutics from the existential analytic and hence the Seinsfrage, it is their respective treatments of birth.
