"Traces of Endings: The Time of Last Things” by Felix Ó Murchadha (NUI,Galway) Published in P. Fairfield & S. Geniusas: Hermeneutics and Phenomenology: Figures and Themes. Dordrecht: Springer, 2018, pp. 175-187. Eschatology can be understood as the interpretation of signs of the last things; signs which are both textual and traced in the experience of ending and finitude. Such hermeneutical readings are ambiguous between hope of salvation and despair in the face of the end of the world. This paper attempts to mediate between the sense of hope and of despair through a phenomenological account of endings as contingent events, cutting across the projections of everyday life. Such a phenomenological hermeneutics of finitude and contingency will be shown to yield an understanding time as characterised by the momentary possibility of transformation in the hope in or despair of an originary source of sense. The question of the ‘last things’, the question, that is, of eschatology, concerns meaning in the intersection of its horizontal and vertical senses. While the meaning of things depends on the horizon of appearance – both spatially and temporally understood – such horizons do not simply indicate the question of the finitude of particular meaning, whether of things or their context, but rather the finitude of meaning as such. That latter question is one which eschatology poses by positing the end of the world, the absolute rupture of meaning projection and sedimentation. Such an end exhausts the very conditions of horizonality itself. Understood in horizonal terms the end is always deferred, the end is always displaced into a new horizon of meaning, which includes and envelopes it. Yet, we know of events – those of death, birth, evil, justice and peace amongst others - which are in a radical sense endings, in that they foreclose the very conditions by which they could be objects of experience. They are in that sense vertical phenomena. Vertically understood, the end is an event which explodes the very horizonal conditions in terms of which they would only be relative ends. To think such endings, these “last things” within the world, is to ask of the fragility of world, the vulnerability of experience. While ‘horizon’ suggests oversight, preparedness and