Abstract

Event semantics takes eventualities, understood as events, processes, and states, to be basic objects in reality, not set-theoretic constructions from something else . I defend this view and argue that events, processes, and states form pairwise disjoint sorts, having the ontological status of atoms, aggregates, and mass objects, respectively. Aggregates are composed of atoms, whereas mass objects are not. Two intermediate groupings of eventualities are important in this mereological characterization: occurrences, comprising events and processes, and eventuality chunks, comprising processes and states. Processes are the sort of eventualities belonging to both categories. ;Focusing on the ontology of occurrences, I argue that processes constitute events, although events are not identical to the processes that constitute them. Events and the processes that constitute them are spatio-temporally superposed, meaning that they have the same spatio-temporal parts; but spatio-temporal superposition is not tantamount to identity, because events and the processes that constitute them are modally distinct. Constitution cannot be characterized in extensional terms, for it appeals to an asymmetry in persistence conditions between the constituent parts and what they constitute . I argue that if a process constitutes an event, then there are worlds in which the process exists but the event does not. In this sense, a process can survive the destruction of the event that it constitutes. ;Eventualities are ontologically dependent particulars: necessarily they exist only if their participants exist, and their identity depends on their participants. I claim that events differ from the processes that constitute them in that they are ontologically dependent upon consequent states as well. An event is necessarily such that it cannot exist unless its consequent state exists, and its identity depends on the identity of its consequent state; an event differs in this respect from the process constituting it, which is not ontologically dependent upon a consequent state