Nothing is more simple or more complicated than the event. In recent years, the attack on any attempts to provide a foundation for philosophy has focused on the "logic of the event." In The Plural Event , Andrew Benjamin reconsiders and reworks philosophy in terms of events and how they are judged. Benjamin offers a sustained philosophical reworking of ontology, providing important readings of key canonical texts in the history of philosophy. In order to avoid the charge of positivism, he (...) provides a cogent interpretation of the process of thinking through while allowing the process to reveal itself in the interpretation of central philosophical texts. The effective presence of ontology, defined as "anoriginal difference," will be familiar to readers of his earlier writings. The Plural Event represents Andrew Benjamin's most thorough and original contribution to contemporary philosophy. (shrink)

The furniture of the world includes planets and pebbles, hopes and fears, fields and waves, theories and problems, births and deaths. As metaphysicians, we want to understand the basic nature of these and other kinds of item; and my topic is the basic nature of births and deaths - more generally, of events. If events are things that happen, what differentiates them from sticks and stones, which are things that exist but do not happen? Do events constitute a fundamental ontological (...) category, or is our event concept just a way of organizing material that could be handled without its aid? With questions like those in the background, I ask: what sort of things are events? Locke and Leibniz knew the answer to this; then Kim rediscovered it; but his rediscovery did less good than it might have because it was ambushed by an error. I shall explain. A sparrow falls. That fall of that sparrow is a particular, located in space and time. It occurs where the sparrow is when it falls, and it occurs just then. It is, then, closely linked to the sparrow, and even more closely to the fact that the sparrow falls there and then. Witness the opening of this paragraph, where I said that a sparrow falls, and went straight on to speak of “that fall”. That the fall exists (= occurs) is a logical upshot of the fact that the sparrow falls. Every event results logically from some such underlying fact: there was a fight because some animals fought, there was a storm because wind and water moved thus and so. In section 12, I shall discuss the rival view that some animals fought because there was a fight. What metaphysical categories have a role in the fact that a certain sparrow fell? Can any of them be identified with the sparrow’s fall? I shall consider five candidates: a fact, a thing, a temporal part of a thing, a property, and a property-instance. (a) The fact that the sparrow falls. One simple reason why an event cannot be a fact is that events have positions in space-time, whereas facts do not.. (shrink)

Various as these are, they have enough in common for them all to count as events , and in recent years philosophers have turned their attention to this ...

The paper reviews the arguments for and against a number of criteria for event identity. The proliferation of such criteria in the 1970’s raises the question of how one is to choose between them. Eight adequacy conditions, whose own adequacy has been argued for elsewhere, are determined to be insufticient for deciding among the criteria. Some concluding remarks about the role of the adequacy conditions and the problem of choosing a criterion are offered. Finally, questions about the nature of and (...) role of an identity criterion are raised. (shrink)

Events are unstructured particulars and their identity conditions are to be stated in terms of necessary spatiotemporal coincidence. In contrast, Davidson says that events are unstructured particulars, with their identity conditions to be given in terms of sameness of causes and effects; and Kim says that events are structured particulars, with their identity conditions to be given in terms of sameness of their constituents. The consequences of my view are then traced for mental events.

A distinction has often been drawn between processes and accomplishments; between, say, *walking* and *walking to the shops*. But it has proved difficult to explain the nature of this distinction in a satisfying way. This paper offers an explanation of the nature of this distinction that is suggested by the idea that there is an ontologically significant correspondence between temporal and spatial notions. A number of writers, such as Alexander Mourelatos (1978) and Barry Taylor (1985), have argued that the spatial (...) notions of space-occupying stuff and space-occupying particular have temporal analogues. This paper builds on these discussions in offering the fuller development of a temporal ontology at the core of which are the notions of time-occupying stuff and of a time-occupying particular. It is then argued that when this analogy is properly understood it is possible to advance a distinctive explanation of the nature of the distinction between processes and accomplishments. The paper then goes on to develop some suggestions about how a temporal ontology involving the notions of temporal mass and of a temporal particular can help to provide explanations of a range of further puzzling temporal notions. In the final section of the paper, this temporal ontology is defended in the face of some possible sources of criticism. (shrink)

This paper aims at discussing the usage by Davidson as to events of Quine's criterion of ontological commitment. According to Davidson, we are ontologically committed to the existence of events as individuals as we employ literally terms such as ‘Caesar’s death’, for instance. Davidson extends this analysis to actions as well, since actions are human events. One of the consequences of this view is that psychology deals with individual events in a non-lawful way. An alternative view is here proposed, based (...) on a complementary criterion, namely ontological density, according to which from the point of view of a given theory, we can always distinguish between events (or phenomena) and individuals (entities) among the overall occurrences described by the theory. Some consequences of this alternative view of psychology as a science dealing lawfully with general human events are also explored here. (shrink)

I explore the problem of ``probabilistic causal preemption'' in the context of a``propensity trajectory'' theory of singular probabilistic causation. This involvesa particular conception of events and a substantive thesis concerning events soconceived.

A course-grained theory of event individuation is defended by arguing that events are spatiotemporal particulars with an ontological affinity to coarse-grained physical objects and by demonstrating that the metalinguistic correlate to one set of adequate identity conditions for events is most plausibly iterpreted as coarsely individuating events. Such coarse-grained events, it is argued, do admit of divisibility proliferation, much like the proliferation of physical objects entailed by Goodman's calculus of individuals. This coase-grained, divisibility proliferation account of events is then used (...) to resolve Davidson's paradox concerning the poisoned space traveller who is killed long befor he dies. (shrink)

Splendour and misery of exaggeration : an introduction -- Thinking as gesture : exaggeration and philosophy -- Trust me : exaggeration and enlightenment -- Odd moves : exaggeration and irony -- The violence of destruction : exaggeration and infinity -- ? and ? end? : exaggeration and politics -- Being guilty : exaggeration and factuality -- Flight simulator : exaggeration and trauma -- The obvious : exaggeration and self-evidence -- Blow job : exaggeration and institution -- Old opera : exaggeration (...) and art -- Life lines : exaggeration and event -- Lexical note. (shrink)

The Process Specification Language (PSL) has been designed to facilitate correct and complete exchange of process information among manufacturing systems, such as scheduling, process modeling, process planning, production planning, simulation, project management, work flow, and business process reengineering. We given an overview of the theories with the PSL ontology, discuss some of the design principles for the ontology, and finish with examples of process specifications that are based on the ontology.

Donald Davidson argues that ‘the stabbing of Caesar’ and ‘the killing of Caesar’ are two descriptions of the one event whereas Jaegwon Kim contends events are more fine-grained and two events occurred, related by supervenience. I argue that neither solution is satisfactory and, inspired by Lynne Rudder Baker, I develop a constitution relation governing cooccurring, co-located events such that the stabbing of Caesar comes to constitute the killing of Caesar when the stabbing occurs in the appropriate circumstances. According to my (...) view, the stabbing of Caesar is metaphysically distinct from the killing of Caesar such that the killing is dependent on the stabbing, yet is not identical to it. (shrink)

States of affairs constitute a basic ontological category in Chisholm's metaphysical system, and yield events and propositions as subclasses. Qua events, they enter into causal relations, and qua propositions, they are objects of our intentional attitudes. This paper expounds and critically examines Chisholm's conception of a state of affairs and his constructions of events and propositions. Various difficulties with some of Chisholm's definitions and procedures are pointed out and discussed. The last section contains a set of suggested modifications to the (...) theory to avoid these difficulties. (shrink)

Moviéndose con libertad entre distintas tradiciones filosóficas, ajeno a cualquier división escolar del pensamiento, el autor describe las formas que toma el simulacro en un recorrido de gran alcance, que abarca desde teoría de la referencia hasta la ontología existencial. "`Todo lo que es profundo ama la máscara´, escribió Nietzsche. En efecto, ¿qué es nuestra existencia, sino una inmensa mascarada? Vivimos como si entendiéramos lo que sucede a nuestro alrededor. Nos comportamos como si pudiéramos prever las consecuencias de nuestros actos. (...) Hablamos como si nos conociéramos a nosotros mismos. Recordamos como si el pasado contuviera un paraíso. Esperamos como si el futuro albergara la salvación. Y escribimos, en fin, como si fuésemos capaces de explicar el sentido último del mundo. La razón engendra, en todos los casos, un simulacro tras otro. Ahora bien, ¿cuándo pisamos suelo firme? ¿Es posible estar frente a la verdadera realidad, la realidad en cuanto tal, la realidad sin más? ¿Es que existe siquiera la verdadera realidad? ¿Qué se oculta tras el velo de los fenómenos: la verdad última, o una revelación por completo inesperada? En esta obra, tan encomiable por el vasto rango de su erudición como por la tensión espiritual que la anima, Rodrigo Laera se atreve a plantear estas preguntas y a desarrollarlas hasta sus últimas consecuencias. Moviéndose con libertad entre distintas tradiciones filosóficas, ajeno a cualquier división escolar del pensamiento, el autor describe las formas que toma el simulacro en un recorrido de gran alcance, que abarca desde teoría de la referencia hasta la ontología existencial. Mediante un estilo argumentativo atento en todo momento al detalle técnico, pero sin incurrir en vanos excesos formalistas, Rodrigo Laera lleva a cabo en este libro, con la paciencia del verdadero amante de la sabiduría, una historia de los desvíos de la razón. Esa razón que, si al soñar produce monstruos, al despertar engendra ficciones. Este es un viaje melancólico al corazón de la apariencia. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to offer a classification of particulars in terms of their relations to spatiotemporal and spatial regions. It begins with an examination of spatiotemporal particulars, and then explores the extent to which a parallel account can be offered of continuants, or spatial particulars that can endure and change over time, assuming such particulars exist. For every spatial particular there are spatiotemporal particulars that can be described as its life and parts thereof. But not every time-slice (...) of a spatiotemporal particular yields a spatial region suitable for hosting a corresponding spatial particular. Events are spatiotemporal particulars though not all spatiotemporal particulars are events. Objects and states are spatial particulars though not all spatial particulars are objects or states. Spatial and spatiotemporal particulars can be either bare regions, or the contents or material contents of such regions, or property instantiations. It is left open whether events are contents of regions, property instantiations, or both. But it is argued that objects are material contents of spatial regions while states of objects are property instantiations. Spatiotemporal particulars can be changes or nonchanges. Events and states can be instantaneous while objects cannot. (shrink)

What constitutes an event? Propelled by this question, Sounding the Event encounters a variety of theories and a host of issues that have implications for not only conceptions of nature and becoming, subject and substance but also practices of time, art and photography. This book explores dialogue in its writing and as it encounters the philosophical utterances of Michel Serres, Isabelle Stengers, Alfred North Whitehead, Jean-Franbliogçois Lyotard, Maurice Blanchot, Gilles Deleuze and Fbliogelix Guattari, and Alain Badiou.

I EXISTENTIAL PROOFS INTRODUCTION Metaphysical problems, like all philosophical problems, arise from a sense of puzzlement. What is puzzling is that the ...

Process modeling is ubiquitous in business and industry. While a great deal of effort has been devoted to the formal and philosophical investigation of processes, surprisingly little research connects this work to real world process modeling. The purpose of this paper is to begin making such a connection. To do so, we first develop a simple mathematical model of activities and their instances based upon the model theory for the NIST Process Specification Language (PSL), a simple language for describing these (...) entities, and a semantics for the latter in terms of the former, and a set of axioms for the semantics based upon the NIST Process Specification Language (PSL). On the basis of this foundation, we then develop a general notion of a process model, and an account of what it is for such a model to be realized by a collection of events. (shrink)

This book present a unified semantic theory of expressions involving the notions of "part" and "whole " in which principles of the individuation of part structures play a central role. The book presents a range of new empirical generalizations with data from English and a variety of other languages involving plurals, mass nouns, adnominal and adverbial modifiers such as 'whole', 'together', and 'alone', nominal and adverbial quanitfiers ranging over parts, and expressions of completion such as 'completely' and 'partly'. She develops (...) a new theory of part structures which differs from traditional mereological theories in that the notion of an integrated whole plays a central role and in that the part structure of an entity is allowed to vary across different situations, perspectives, and dimensions. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is rather modest: we do not intend to reconstruct Aristotle’s theory of truth (although we are convinced that there is such a thing), and we will not try to settle the issue concerning Bivalence in Aristotle. We merely want, on the one hand, to argue for the consistency between the main Aristotelian texts on truth and a possible rejection of Bivalence; and on the other hand, to investigate the conditions of a possible counterexample to Bivalence. (...) The motivation for this research is also very specific. We are interested in the apparent violation of Bivalence introduced by vague predicates, and in particular we want to respond to a family of arguments put forward by T. Williamson in support of the idea that allowing for exceptions to Bivalence would be incoherent. We have focused on these arguments for two reasons. On the one hand, what is allegedly threatened by a denial of Bivalence is no less than the very “nature of truth or falsity”. On the other hand, Aristotle is explicitly mentioned as one of the defendants of this “natural” conception of truth, and we are reminded about the connection between Aristotle’s theory and Tarski’s semantic conception. These arguments, therefore, give us an occasion to explore Aristotle’s analysis of the nature of truth and falsity, and to examine its connection with the Tarskian conception of truth. In particular, we would like to question the assumption, which has become a commonplace in the field of analytical philosophy, that Aristotle’s notion of truth can be encoded in the pair of disquotational biconditionals that derive from Tarski’s “T schema”. (shrink)

A study of how syntax relates to meaning by a leader of the new generation of philosopher-linguists.

Musicians and theorists such as the radiophonic pioneer Pierre Schaeffer, view the products of new audio technologies as devices whereby the experience of sound can be displaced from its causal origins and achieve new musical or poetic resonances. Accordingly, the listening experience associated with sonic art within this perspective is ‘acousmatic’; the process of sound generation playing no role in the description or understanding of the experience as such. In this paper I shall articulate and defend a position according to (...) which an adequate phenomenology of auditory experience must refer to mechanisms of sound generation. This position is shown to follow from a phenomenology of sounds as located events and a physicalist account of auditory properties as features of the temporal development of such events. (shrink)

In this essay I argue for a constructivist account of the entities composing the object languages of Davidsonian truth theories and a quotational account of the reference from metalinguistic expressions to interpreted utterances. I claim that ‘radical quotation’ requires an ontology of repeatable events with strong similarities to Derrida's account of iterable events. In part one I summarise Davidson's account of interpretation and Olav Gjelsivk's arguments to the effect that the syntactic individuation of linguistic objects is only workable if interpreters (...) make richer assumptions about semantic properties than Davidson can tolerate. In part two I show that the objectivist account of syntactic objects which Gjelsivk's arguments presuppose is incompatible with one corollary of Davidsonian semantic indeterminacy: namely, the relativity of language to interpretative scheme. In place of this an account of radical interpretation is presented in which a quotational theory of metalinguistic reference furnishes the requisite relativity. In part three I argue that this account requires that particular utterance events must be repeatable to be radically quotable and give reasons why particularity and repeatability are not incompatible. (shrink)

Paul Pietroski, in Causing Actions (2000), aims to articulate a dualistic framework that 'makes room for persons'. What is especially intriguing about Pietroski's framework is that it denies both of the above assumptions: (i) it is resolutely non-naturalistic, and (ii) it is a dualism of events, said to steer between substance and property dualisms. If Pietroski is right then both naturalism and the three-part taxonomy are worse than mistaken: they are in..

Despite important similarities, events differ from states of affairs. Recent theories of events (Davidson's, Kim's) have ignored the distinction, preferring to focus on relations of composition between events and states, indifferently conceived, and properties, objects, and times. It might be proposed, however, that events and states can be distinguished by their composition. I argue against a compositional approach, in favor of a modal approach, on which events are distinguished from states in virtue of being essentially dynamic. This view locates the (...) difference between events and states in their different existential statuses. While the view neither endorses nor forecloses dependency relations between events, states, and objects, it offers ways to do some of the explanatory work that recent theories assign to composition relations. (shrink)

This thesis develops a hermeneutic philosophy of science to provide insights into physics education. -/- Modernity cloaks the authentic character of modern physics whenever discoveries entertain us or we judge theory by its use. Those who justify physics education through an appeal to its utility, or who reject truth as an aspect of physics, relativists and constructivists, misunderstand the nature of physics. Demonstrations, not experiments, reveal the essence of physics as two characteristic engagements with truth. First, truth in its guise (...) as correspondence enables a human being to prepare for the distinctive event of physics. -/- Second, the event of physics occurs in human perception when someone forces a hidden reality to disclose an aspect of itself. Thus, the ground of physics is our human involvement with reality achieved by way of truth. -/- To support this account of physics, the thesis reports phenomenological investigations into Isaac Newton’s involvement with optics and a secondary school physics laboratory. These involve interpretations of Heidegger’s theory of beings, schema and signification. The project draws upon, and contributes to, the hermeneutic phenomenology of modern physics, a tradition in continental philosophy that begins with Immanuel Kant, and advances particularly from Martin Heidegger to Patrick Heelan. -/- The thesis advocates an ontological pedagogy for modern physics which has as its purpose each individual student’s engagement with reality and truth. Students may achieve this through demonstrations of phenomena that will enable them to dwell with physics, an experience that contrasts with their embroilment in modernity, and which perpetuates nature’s own science. (shrink)

We begin by describing recent developments in the burgeoning discipline of applied ontology, focusing especially on the ways ontologies are providing a means for the consistent representation of scientific data. We then introduce Basic Formal Ontology (BFO), a top-level ontology that is serving as domain-neutral framework for the development of lower level ontologies in many specialist disciplines, above all in biology and medicine. BFO is a bicategorial ontology, embracing both three-dimensionalist (continuant) and four-dimensionalist (occurrent) perspectives within a single framework. We (...) examine how BFO-conformant domain ontologies can deal with the consistent representation of scientific data deriving from the measurement of processes of different types, and we outline on this basis the first steps of an approach to the classification of such processes within the BFO framework. (shrink)

In this paper, I explore the notion of a “causal power”, particularly as it is relevant to a theory of properties whereby properties are individuated by the causal powers they bestow on the objects that instantiate them. I take as my target certain eliminativist positions that argue that certain kinds of properties (or relations) do not exist because they fail to bestow unique causal powers on objects. But the notion of a causal powers is inextricably bound up with our notion (...) of what an event is, and not only is there disagreement as to which theory of events is appropriate, but on the three prevailing theories, it can be shown that the eliminativists arguments do not follow. (shrink)

A line of argument, presented by David Lewis, to show that the correspondence theory of truth is not a real alternative to deflationism is developed. It is shown that truthmakers, construed as concrete events or states of affairs, are unsatisfactory entities, since we do not know how to individuate them or how to identify their essential qualities. Furthermore, the real work is usually done by supervenience relations, which have little to do with truth. It is argued that the Equivalence Schema (...) is quite sufficient to yield a unitary property of being true, and that this generates a weak, but non-trivial, version of the correspondence theory of truth. (shrink)

It is argued that current solutions to the question of how to individuate events do not work. Jonathan Bennett's thesis that the indeterminacy here is only semantic, not ontological, is refuted. An alternative account of why events resemble facts (although their identity criteria are less fine-grained) is defended.

A critical survey of the main philosophical theories about events and event talk, organized in three main sections: (i) Events and Other Categories (Events vs. Objects; Events vs. Facts; Events vs. Properties; Events vs. Times); (ii) Types of Events (Activities, Accomplishments, Achievements, and States; Static and Dynamic Events; Actions and Bodily Movements; Mental and Physical Events); (iii) Existence, Identity, and Indeterminacy.

Broadly understood, events are things that happen -- things such as births and deaths, thunder and lightening, explosions, weddings, hiccups and hand-waves, dances, smiles, walks. Whether such things form a genuine metaphysical category is a question that has attracted the sustained interest of philosophers, especially in the second half of the 20th century. But there is little question that human perception, action, language, and thought manifest at least a..

A critical review of the main themes arising out of recent literature on the semantics of ordinary event talk. The material is organized in four sections: (i) the nature of events, with emphasis on the opposition between events as particulars and events as universals; (ii) identity and indeterminacy, with emphasis on the unifier/multiplier controversy; (iii) events and logical form, with emphasis on Davidson’s treatment of the form of action sentences; (iv) linguistic applications, with emphasis on issues concerning aspectual phenomena, the (...) telicity/atelicity distinction, the treatment of statives, and temporal quantification. (shrink)

Most event-referring expressions are vague: it is utterly difficult, if not impossible, to specify the exact spatiotemporal location of an event from the words that we use to refer to it. We argue that in spite of certain prima facie obstacles, such vagueness can be given a purely semantic (broadly supervaluational) account.

Topic of this paper is the way in which the structure of events features in discourse. We focus on the structure as introduced by verbs that express some sense of progress. First it is shown by means of examples that this structure is anaphorically available in discourse. Then we go on to discuss the different ways in which the same event may be structured within one discourse situation. We give formal representations of the crucial examples in many-sorted dynamic logic.

In his book Persons and Objects, Professor Chisholm undertakes to show the satisfactoriness of an ontology which does not admit the existence of concrete events, such as sneezings, runnings, etc. He attempts to show that if we allow the existence of states of affairs, these being everlastingly existing entities, we need not acknowledge the existence of those perishing entities which are concrete events. I n this paper I discuss the tenability of this contention, considering especially whether the reductions that Chisholm (...) offers cope satisfactorily with the phenomena of tense. I conclude that they do not. My conclusion is that, at this point in history, we do not know whether ontology can do without concrete events. (shrink)