## 1. Events and Other Categories


### 1.1 Events vs. Objects



Although not undisputed, some standard differences between events and
physical objects are commonplace in the philosophical literature.
First, there would seem to be a difference in their respective modes
of being: material objects such as stones and chairs are said to
*exist*; events are said to *occur* or *happen*
or *take place* (Hacker 1982a; Cresswell 1986). Second, there
would seem to be differences in the way objects and events relate to
space and time. Ordinary objects are supposed to have relatively crisp
spatial boundaries and vague temporal boundaries; events, by contrast,
would have relatively vague spatial boundaries and crisp temporal
boundaries. Objects are said to be invidiously located in
space--they *occupy* their spatial location; events
tolerate co-location much more easily (Quinton 1979; Hacker 1982b).
Objects can move; events cannot (Dretske 1967). Finally, objects are
standardly construed as enduring continuants--they *are
in* time and persist through time by being wholly present at every
time at which they exist; events are perduring occurrents--they
*take up* time and persist by having different parts or
"stages" at different times (Johnson 1921; Mellor 1980;
Simons 2000).



The last distinction is perhaps the most controversial. On the one
hand, there are philosophers--from Whitehead (1919), Broad
(1923), and Russell (1927) to Quine (1950), Lewis (1986c), Heller
(1990), Sider (2001) and many others--who conceive of objects as
four-dimensional entities that extend across time just as they extend
across space. Some such philosophers would accordingly draw no
metaphysically significant distinction between objects and events,
treating both as entities of the same kind: an object would simply be
a "monotonous" event; an event would be an
"unstable" object (Goodman 1951). More generally, the
relevant distinction would be one of degree, and while
'event' is standardly applied to things that develop and
change fast in time, 'object' would apply to those things
that strike us as "firm and internally coherent" (Quine
1970). On the other hand, there are also philosophers who reject the
distinction on the side of events, by construing at least some such
entities--e.g., processes--as continuants: what is present
at any moment when an apple is decaying or a person is walking down
the street is the whole enduring process, not just part of it (Roberts
1979; Stout 1997, 2003, 2016; Galton 2006a,b, 2008; Galton &
Mizoguchi 2009; Kassel 2019). This view, in turn, admits of several
variants and alternatives, e.g. based on different ways of
understanding the notion of a continuant (Steward 2013, 2015) or its
relation to the stuff of which a continuant is composed (Crowther
2011, 2018).



If a metaphysical distinction between objects and events is granted,
then a question arises as to the relation between the entities in the
two categories. Objects are prime actors in events; objectless events
are uncommon. But so are eventless objects; events make up the lives
of objects. In a radical mood, however, one may think of the entities
in one category as being metaphysically dependent on entities in the
other. For instance, it has been claimed that events supervene on
their participants (Lombard 1986; Bennett 1988) as it has been claimed
that objects depend for their existence on the events in which they
participate (Deleuze 1969; Parsons 1991), or that they exist at any
given time just insofar as they participate in some events occurring
at that time (Costa 2017). In a more moderate way, one can grant
objects and events an equal ontological status but maintain that
either objects or events are primary in the order of thought. Thus, it
has been argued that a pure event-based ontology would not be
sufficient for the success of our re-identifying practices, which
require a stable frame of reference of the sort that is adequately
provided only by objects (Strawson 1959). A similar asymmetry between
objects and events seems to be endorsed by natural language, which has
expressions such as 'the fall of the apple' but not
'the pomification of the fall'. However, these asymmetries
may be attenuated to the extent that objects, too, may and sometimes
must be identified via reference to events. For example, if we track
down the father of Sebastian or the author of *Waverley*, it is
by identifying certain events in the first place--of fathering
and of writing, respectively (Moravcsik 1965; Davidson 1969; Lycan
1970; Thalberg 1978; Tiles 1981).


### 1.2 Events vs. Facts



No matter what their relationships, events are naturally contrasted
with objects insofar as both are conceived of as *individuals*.
Both appear to be concrete, temporally and spatially located entities
organized into part-whole hierarchies. Both can be counted, compared,
quantified over, referred to, and variously described and
re-described. (It has been argued that our conceptions of these two
categories are so closely tied as to be structurally complementary, in
that any characterization of the concept *event* that only
mentions spatial and temporal features yields a characterization of
the concept *object* by a simple replacement of temporal with
spatial predicates, and vice versa; see Mayo 1961.) Accordingly,
events are generally distinguished from facts, too, which are
characterized by features of abstractness and a-temporality: the event
of Caesar's death took place in Rome in 44 BCE, but that Caesar
died is a fact here as it is in Rome, today as in 44 BCE (Dodd 2009).
One could indeed speculate that for every event there is a companion
fact, viz. the fact that the event took place (Bennett 1988), but the
two would still be categorially distinct. The death of Caesar must no
more be confused with the fact that Caesar died than the Queen of
England should be confused with the fact that England has a Queen
(Ramsey 1927).



According to some authors, this categorial distinction is actually
reflected in the different sorts of expressions through which facts
and events are referred to in ordinary language. In the terminology of
Vendler (1967), 'Caesar's death' is a perfect
nominal: the process of nominalization is complete and the expression
can only be modified by adjectival phrases ('Caesar's
violent death'). By contrast, a gerundive such as
'Caesar's dying', or a *that*-clause such as
'that Caesar died', are imperfect nominals that still have
"a verb alive and kicking inside them": they can therefore
tolerate tenses and auxiliaries ('Caesar's having
died', 'That Caesar might die'), adverbs
('Caesar's dying violently'), negation
('Caesar's not dying'), etc. With some
qualifications (e.g. McCann 1979), the metaphysical hypothesis would
be that, as a norm, perfect nominals stand for events, whereas facts
or states of affairs are the referents of imperfect nominals.



Some philosophers, however, conceive of the link between events and
facts as being much closer than this--close enough to justify
assimilating the two categories (Wilson 1974; Tegtmeier 2000) or at
least treating both as species of the same "state of
affairs" genus (Chisholm 1970). This has two main consequences.
On the one hand, because facts corresponding to non-equivalent
propositions are distinct, events conceived of as facts or fact-like
particulars are fine-grained entities that cannot be freely
re-described or re-identified under different conceptualizations: the
fact that Caesar died violently is different from the fact that he
died, hence the death of Caesar and his violent death would be two
different events (Chisholm 1971), as opposed to one and the same event
under different descriptions (Davidson 1969; Anscombe 1979). On the
other hand, because linguistic expressions of facts are semantically
transparent, a Fregean line of argument could be concocted to show
instead that events construed as facts are too coarse-grained, to the
point of melting into a single "big" entity (Davidson
1967a). (The argument is known as the "slingshot
argument", following Barwise & Perry 1981; for details, see
Neale 2001.)



Other philosophers have insisted on distinguishing events from facts
but have given accounts that effectively amount to an assimilation.
This is true especially of those theories that construe events as
property exemplifications, i.e., exemplifications *of*
properties *by* objects *at* times (Kim 1966, 1969;
Martin 1969; Goldman 1970; Taylor 1985; Hendrickson 2006). On such
theories, events are individual entities. But because they have a
structure, a difference in any constituent is sufficient to yield a
different event. In particular, a difference in the relevant
constitutive property is sufficient to distinguish events such as
Caesar's death, construed as Caesar's exemplification of
the property of *dying*, and Caesar's violent death,
construed as his exemplification of the property of *dying
violently* (Kim 1976). Again, this makes events virtually as
fine-grained as facts. It bears emphasis, however, that this
consequence is not intrinsic to the theory of events as property
exemplifications. Both Caesar's death and his violent death
could be construed as Caesar's exemplification of one and the
same property *P*, describable both as a dying and--with
greater accuracy--as a dying violently. Thus, even if construed
as a structured complex, an event can be coarsely referred to insofar
as its names need not be sensitive to this structure (Bennett 1988).
In this way, the distinction between events and facts can be
reinstated in terms of a firm distinction between semantic and
metaphysical aspects (respectively) of the theory of
event-descriptions.



Similar considerations apply to those theories that treat events as
situations, in the sense familiar from situation semantics (Barwise
& Perry 1983). On such theories, events are construed as sets of
functions from spatiotemporal locations to "situation
types" defined as sequences of objects standing or failing to
stand in a certain relation. But while the formal machinery delivers a
fine-grained account, the algorithm for applying the machinery to
natural language sentences leaves room for flexibility.


### 1.3 Events vs. Properties



A third metaphysical category with which events have sometimes been
contrasted is that of properties. If events are individuals, then they
are not properties, at least insofar as properties are construed as
universals. Individuals exist or occur whereas universals recur.
However, some philosophers have taken very seriously the intuition
that in some cases events may be said to recur, as when we say that
the sun rises every morning (Chisholm 1970; Braude 1971; Johnson 1975;
Brandl 1997, 2000). If so, then it is natural to think of events as
being more similar to properties than to individuals, similar enough
to justify treating them as a *kind* of property--e.g., as
properties of moments or intervals of time (Montague 1969), properties
of cross-world classes of individuals (Lewis 1986b), or properties of
sets of world segments (von Kutschera 1993). For instance, on the
first of these accounts, the event of the sun's rising is the
property of being an interval during which the sun rises. As a
characterization of event types, this would be uncontroversial and
would allow one to construe particular events as tokens of the
corresponding type. (One such construal would correspond to the
above-mentioned conception of events as property exemplifications.)
But to conceive of events as universal properties is to go beyond this
uncontroversial fact and to reject the existence of event tokens
altogether, even when it comes to "particular" events such
as the unique rising of the sun that we witnessed this morning. Rather
than an instance of the universal *sun rising*, such an event
would be a universal in its own right, albeit a universal of such a
restricted sort and of such a degree of singularity as to be
instantiated only once.



One possible view about properties is that they are not universals but
rather particulars of a special sort--viz. abstract particulars
(Stout 1923) or tropes (Williams 1953). According to this view, the
redness of this apple is different from the redness of anything else,
not because of its extreme singularity (other things could agree with
the apple colorwise) but because it is the redness of *this*
apple. It exists here and now, where and while the apple exists.
Likewise, this morning's rising of the sun would be numerically
different from (though qualitatively similar to) any other
morning's rising of the sun. If so, then the view that events
are properties becomes compatible with the view that they are
spatiotemporally located. An event would just be a particularized
property located at some region of space-time (Bennett 1996). (Once
again, this conception is closely related to the conception of events
as property exemplifications, although the term
'exemplification' suggests a construal of properties as
universals. Some authors, e.g. Bennett 1988, actually identify the two
conceptions; others, e.g. Macdonald 1989, reject the identification on
account of the difference between property instances and property
exemplifications.)



A variant of the trope conception construes events as trope sequences
(Campbell 1981). However, since tropes are particulars, a sequence of
tropes at a place may itself be viewed as a trope, hence this variant
is best regarded as a specification of what sort of tropes events are.
Similar remarks apply to those theories that construe events as
relational tropes (Mertz 1996), or even as higher-order tropes
(Moltmann 2013). 


### 1.4 Events vs. Times



The intuition that events are properties of times can also be fleshed
out in terms of thinner metaphysical commitments, by construing events
simply as times *cum description*, i.e., as temporal instants
or intervals during which certain statements hold (van Benthem 1983).
On this view, for example, this morning's rising of the sun is
identified by an ordered pair <*i*,ph> where
*i* is the relevant time interval (corresponding to the
descriptor 'this morning') and ph is the sentence
'The sun rises'. Of course, this treatment does not do
justice to some of the intuitions underlying the *prima facie*
commitments to events mentioned at the beginning--for instance,
events can be perceived but times cannot (Gibson 1975). But because of
the availability of fully developed theories of intervals along with
fully developed interval-based semantics (Cresswell 1979; Dowty 1979),
and because of equally well worked-out traditional theories of
instants and instant-based semantics (Prior 1967), such accounts are
especially attractive from a reductionist perspective. One might even
want to construe events as *spatiotemporal* regions cum
description, distinguishing, e.g., between this morning's rising
of the sun in London and its rising in Paris.



The link between events and times has, however, been explored also in
the opposite direction. If events are assumed as a primitive
ontological category, then one may dispense with temporal instants or
intervals and construe them as derived entities. The most classical
treatment of this sort proceeds by construing temporal instants as
maximal sets of pairwise simultaneous (or partially simultaneous)
events (Russell 1914; Whitehead 1929; Walker 1947), but other
treatments are possible. For example, it has been suggested that the
mathematical connection between the way events are perceived to be
ordered and the underlying temporal dimension is essentially that of a
free construction (in the category-theoretic sense) of linear
orderings from event orderings, induced by the binary relation *x
wholly precedes y* (Thomason 1984, 1989). Treatments such as these
provide a reduction of time in terms of relations among events and are
therefore especially germane to a relational conception of time (and,
more generally, of space-time). Modal variants (Forbes 1993) as well
as mereotopological variants (Pianesi & Varzi 1996) of such views
are also available.


## 2. Types of Events


### 2.1 Activities, Accomplishments, Achievements, and States



Philosophers who agree with a conception of events as particulars
typically distinguish different sorts of such particulars. A classic
typology distinguishes four sorts: activities, accomplishments,
achievements, and states (Ryle 1949; Vendler 1957). An
*activity*, such as Anita's walking uphill, is a
homogeneous event: its sub-events satisfy the same description as the
activity itself, which has no natural finishing point or culmination.
An *accomplishment*, such as Anita's climbing the
mountain, may have a culmination, but is never homogeneous. An
*achievement*, such as Anita's reaching the top,
*is* a culminating event (and is therefore always
instantaneous). And a *state*, such as Anita's knowing
the shortest way, is homogeneous and may extend over time, but it
makes no sense to ask how long it took or whether it culminated.
Sometimes accomplishments and achievements are grouped together into a
single category of *performances* (Kenny 1963). Sometimes
achievements have also been called *events* tout court and all
other events have been grouped together into a broadly understood
category of temporally extended entities, called *processes*
(Ingarden 1935); the word '*eventuality*' may then
be used as a label covering both categories (Bach 1986).



Some authors introduce aspectual considerations into the taxonomy,
drawing on Aristotle's distinction between *Energeia* and
*Kinesis* (Ackrill 1965). The idea is that different
verbs describe different types of events: verbs with no continuous
form ('know') correspond to states; verbs with continuous
form for which the present continuous entails the past perfect
('Anita is walking uphill' entails 'Anita walked
uphill') correspond to activities; and verbs for which the
present continuous entails the negation of the past perfect
('Anita is climbing the mountain' entails 'Anita has
not (yet) climbed the mountain', at least in the relevant
context) correspond to performances (Potts 1965; Taylor 1965; Evans
1967; Mourelatos 1978; Graham 1980). This basic taxonomy can be
refined in various ways (see Mittwoch 2019 for an overview) and
several linguistically sophisticated theories of verb tense and aspect
have been developed on such grounds (see, *inter alia*, Comrie
1976; Taylor 1977; Dowty 1979; Declerck 1979; Freed 1979; Bach 1981;
Mittwoch 1988; Galton 1984; Krifka 1989; Verkuyl 1989; Smith 1991;
Giorgi & Pianesi 1998; Kuhl 2008). However, the legitimacy of
drawing ontological categorizations from such linguistic distinctions
has been questioned (Gill 1993).


### 2.2 Static and Dynamic Events



One may also want to distinguish between *dynamic* events, such
as Anita's walking, and *static* events, such as
Anita's resting under a tree. According to some authors, the
latter are not events proper because they do not involve any change
(Ducasse 1926). In the most abstract construal, a change is an ordered
pair of states of affairs: an initial state and an end state (von
Wright 1963). More substantial accounts of events as changes describe
them as exemplifications of dynamic properties, i.e., properties that
an object has by virtue of a "movement" in some quality
space (Quinton 1979; Lombard 1979, 1986). However, the question of
whether all events should be or involve changes of some sort is
controversial (Montmarquet 1980; Steward 1997; Mellor 1998; Simons
2003) and it may be argued that it is ultimately a matter of
stipulation--hence of little metaphysical import (Casati &
Varzi 2008).



If static events are admitted, the question arises of whether they
should be kept distinct from states (Parsons 1989; Maienborn 2019).
One plausible assumption is that the distinction between the static
and the dynamic aspects of the world is skew to the distinction
between states and activities. As there may be static activities, so
there may be dynamic states. Walking is a state of Anita's that
is dynamic, as opposed to her state of resting, which is static. The
walk itself is an activity of Anita's that is dynamic, as
opposed to the rest she took under a tree, which may be considered a
static activity.


### 2.3 Actions and Bodily Movements



*Prima facie*, actions are naturally categorized as a subclass
of events, namely, animate events. Like all events, actions are said
to occur or take place, not to exist, and their relation to time and
space is event-like as well: they have relatively clear beginnings and
endings but unclear spatial boundaries, they appear to tolerate
co-location, and they cannot be said to move from one place to another
or to endure from one time to another, but rather extend in space and
time by having spatial as well as temporal parts (Thomson 1977).
Actions and events appear to be on a par in causal explanations, too:
actions can be causes of which events are effects (Davidson 1963,
1967b). Some authors, however, prefer to draw a distinction here and
to treat actions as *relations* between agents and events,
namely as instances of the relation 'bringing about' (von
Wright 1963; Chisholm 1964; Bach 1980; Bishop 1983; Segerberg 1989),
or perhaps the relation 'seeing to it that' (Belnap and
Perloff 1988; Tuomela and Sandu 1994; Horty 2001). On such views,
actions are not individuals unless relations are themselves construed
as tropes.



Whether or not actions are treated as events, one might be tempted to
distinguish between *actions* proper (such as Anita's
raising of her arm) and *bodily movements* (such as the rising
of Anita's arm), or between *intentional* actions
(Anita's walk) and *unintentional* ones (Anita's
fall). For some authors, this is necessary in order to explain
important facts of human behavior (Montmarquet 1978; Hornsby 1980a,b;
Searle 1983; Brand 1984; Mele 1997). It has been argued, for example,
that the relationship between an action and the corresponding bodily
movement is not one of identity but, rather, an asymmetric relation of
generation (Goldman 1970), or of mereological inclusion (Thomson
1977), or of physical constitution (Evnine 2016), or of embodiment
(Fine 2022). Or perhaps the relationship is more complex: all actions
would be sequences of the form volition-cause-bodily movement (Moore
1993), or structured events that begin in the brain and end with the
body's moving (Smith 2021). However, it has also been argued
that such distinctions do not pertain to metaphysics but rather to the
conceptual apparatus by means of which we describe the realm of things
that happen. On this view, an arm raising is just an arm's
rising under a mentalistic description (Anscombe 1957, 1979; Davidson
1971; Sher 1973).


### 2.4 Mental and Physical Events



A similar story applies to the distinction between *mental*
events (Anita's decision to wear boots) and *physical* or
*physiological* events (such and such neurons firing). One may
think that this distinction is real insofar as events of the latter
sort are expected to fall naturally into the nomological net of
physical theories whereas the former seem to escape it. But one may
also want to resist this line of thought and maintain that the
distinction between the mental and the physical concerns exclusively
the vocabulary with which we describe what goes on. These options have
important ramifications for various issues in the philosophy of
mind--e.g., issues of mental causation (Heil & Mele 1993;
Walter & Heckmann 2003; Gibb *et al.* 2013). If the
distinction between mental and physical events is ontologically
significant, then the question arises of how these two sorts of event
causally interact with each other, leading to various forms of
nomological or anomalous dualism (Foster 1991). By contrast, the claim
that the distinction is purely semantic is congenial to a monist
position, whether nomological or anomalous (Macdonald 1989).



Anomalous monism has been popular especially among philosophers who
accept a particularist conception of events as widely redescribable
entities, for such a conception allows one to accept the materialist
claim that all events are physical (regardless of whether one
describes them in mentalistic terms) while rejecting the seeming
consequence that mental goings-on can be given purely physical
explanations (precisely because only a physicalistic vocabulary is
suited to such explanations) (Nagel 1965; Davidson 1970, 1993). Some
authors, however, have argued that this line of argument falls prey to
the charge of epiphenomenalism, to the effect that mental events would
lack causal or explanatory powers altogether (Honderich 1982; Robinson
1982; Kim 1989; Campbell 1998, 2005; Welshon 1999).


### 2.5 Negative Events



Events are things that happen. In some cases, however, the same sort
of *prima facie* evidence that suggests a realist attitude
towards such things might suggest a similar attitude towards things
that do not actually happen, including "negative actions"
of various sorts (Danto 1966; Ryle 1973). We speak of Anita's
walk with the same easiness with which we speak of the talk she did
not deliver, the nap she did not take, the party she failed to
organize; we seem to quantify over such things, and we normally engage
in causal talk that seems to refer explicitly to negative causes, as
when we reason that Anita's failure to turn off the gas caused
an explosion, or that her omitting the cutlery from the wedding list
made Susan angry. Some authors take such evidence at face value,
drawing a distinction at the ontological level: a good inventory of
the world ought to include "negative" events and actions
along with ordinary, "positive" ones (Lee 1978; Vermazen
1985; De Swart 1996; Przepiorkowski 1999; Higginbotham 2000;
Mossel 2009; Silver 2018; Bernard & Champollion 2018). Others
dissent: we often speak *as though* there were such things, but
deep down we want our words to be interpreted in such a way as to
avoid ontological commitment. Thus, either we are just engaging in
mere counterfactual speculations, or else the putative negative events
are just ordinary, positive events under a negative description:
'Anita's omitting the cutlery from the wedding
list', for example, would refer to her drawing up a wedding list
that contains no cutlery, 'Mary's not moving' would
describe Mary's working hard to master urges to move, etc. (Mele
2005; Varzi 2008). The latter view can also be construed in
metaphysical (as opposed to semantic) terms, at least in some cases:
for *x* to omit to ph (refrain from ph-ing, etc.) at
*t* would be for *x* to ensure, through their actual
behavior, that they do not ph at *t* (Payton 2016, 2018).




The case of negative causation is especially challenging, not last
because of the link between causation and such ethical and legal
matters as passive killing (Bennett 1966; Green 1980; Foot 1984), good
Samaritanism (Kleinig 1976) and, more generally, moral responsibility
(Weinryb 1980; Walton 1980; Williams 1995; Fischer 1997; Clarke 2014).
Here it is also customary to introduce finer-grained discriminations,
distinguishing several ways in which an agent may fail to do
something, e.g. *(trying and) not succeeding*,
*refraining*, *omitting*, and *allowing* (Brand
1971; Milanich 1984; Hall 1984; Bach 2010). At least with regard to
some such ways, it is very tempting to endorse a realist ontology. If
so, the difficulty naturally arises of how and where to draw the line.
For example, the realist about omissions will have to find a
principled way of refraining from treating all omissions, including
*non-salient* ones, as causes (Gorr 1979; Lewis 1986a, 2004;
Thomson 2003; Menzies 2004; McGrath 2005; Sartorio 2009; Bernstein
2014). On the other hand, the antirealist will have to explain how one
can account for such causal talk while holding on to the view that
every causal situation develops from "positive factors
alone" (Armstrong 1999). Some would insist that every alleged
case of negative causation can be described in terms of positive
causation (Laliberte 2013). Others--the
majority--would resist ontological commitment by recasting the
logical structure of the relevant causal claims in suitable ways, e.g.
as causal statements about events that are counterfactually described
(Hunt 2005), or as "quasi-causal" claims about what would
have been a cause if the omitted event had happened (Dowe 2001), or as
mere causal explanations in which the explanans does not stand to the
explanandum as cause to effect (Beebee 2004; Varzi 2007; Lombard &
Hudson 2020).


## 3. Event Metaphysics and Semantics


### 3.1 Existence



As mentioned in the Introduction, one finds a *prima facie*
commitment to events in various aspects of human perception, action,
language, and thought. In the contemporary philosophical literature
however, the main line of argument offered to back up this commitment
comes from considerations of logical form. Not only does ordinary talk
involve explicit reference to and quantification over events, as when
one says that *Caesar's death* was violent or that
*two explosions* were heard last night. Ordinary talk also
seems to involve several ways of adverting to events implicitly.
Adverbial modification is a standard example (Reichenbach 1947; Prior
1949; Kenny 1963). We say that Brutus stabbed Caesar with a knife. If
this statement is taken to assert that a certain three-place relation
obtains among Brutus, Caesar, and a knife, then it is hard to explain
why the statement entails that Brutus stabbed Caesar (a statement that
involves a different, two-place relation). By contrast, if we take our
statement to assert that a certain event occurred (namely, a stabbing
of Caesar by Brutus) *and* that it had a certain property
(namely, of being done with a knife), then the entailment is
straightforward (Davidson 1967a; Parsons 1985). Similarly for static
events, as with the inference from 'Brutus is in the park under
the tree' to 'Brutus is in the park' (Parsons 1988).
These reasons do not constitute a proof that there are such entities
as events. But they are telling insofar as one is interested in an
account of how it is that certain statements mean what they mean,
where the meaning of a statement is at least in part determined by its
logical relations to other statements. For another example, it has
been argued that singular causal statements cannot be analyzed in
terms of a causal connective (essentially for reasons having to do
with the above-mentioned slingshot argument) but rather require that
causation be treated as a binary relation holding between individual
events (Davidson 1967b). A third example involves the semantics of
perceptual reports with naked infinitive complements, as in
'Cassius saw Brutus flee', which is analyzed as
'Cassius saw an event that was a fleeing by Brutus'
(Higginbotham 1983; Vlach 1983; Gisborne 2010). Still a fourth example
involves the logical form of statements with plural subjects, such as
'Brutus and Cassius lifted a heavy stone (together)',
which is analyzed as reporting, not the exploits of a "plural
object", but rather an event involving more than one agent
(Higginbotham & Schein 1986; Schein 1993; Lasersohn 1990, 1995;
Landman 1996, 2000). Many more such arguments have been offered, also
by authors working within different programs in linguistics (Parsons
1990; Peterson 1997; Rothstein 1998; Link 1998; Higginbotham *et
al*. 2000; Pietroski 2005; Mittwoch 2005; van Lambalgen & Hamm
2005; Robering 2014).



On the other hand, some philosophers have been dissatisfied with this
sort of "existential proof" and have argued instead that
all talk that seems to involve explicit or implicit reference to or
quantification over events can be paraphrased so as to avoid the
commitment. For example, it has been argued that a term such as
'Anita's walk' goes proxy for the corresponding
statement 'Anita walked', so to say that Anita's
walk was pleasant is just to say that Anita walked pleasantly (Geach
1965). Similar paraphrases have been offered to deal with the case of
explicit quantifier-phrases such as 'two explosions' as
well as with the implicit event quantification that lies behind
adverb-dropping inferences (Parsons 1970; Clark 1970, 1974; Schwartz
1975; Fulton 1979; Graves 1994), singular causal statements (Horgan
1978, 1982; Wilson 1985, Needham 1988, 1994, Mellor 1991, 1995), and
so on. On the face of it, it appears that questions of logical form
leave the existential issue undecided, at least insofar as an
event-committing analysis automatically turns into an eliminativist
paraphrase when read in the opposite direction (and vice versa). Even
the absence of suitable paraphrases may be seen as a mere linguistic
limitation that should not force us to "accept" events
into our ontology (Melia 2000), just as avoiding commitment via
paraphrase may not be a reason to "reject" them (Goldwater
2023).


### 3.2 Identity



Another issue that appears to be undecided concerns so-called identity
criteria for events, which has been the focus of an intense debate
(Bradie 1983; Pfeifer 1989; Mackie 1997). Is Anita's walk the
same event as her pleasant walk? Was Brutus's stabbing of Caesar
the same event as his killing of Caesar? Was it the same as his
killing of the last Roman dictator? Was it the same as the one and
only assassination that took place in the Roman Senate on the Ides of
March, 44 BCE? (Or again, with reference to the conceptual distinction
between actions and bodily movements: is someone's raising of
their arm the same event as the rising of their arm?)



Some philosophers take these to be metaphysical
questions--questions whose answers call for adequate identity
criteria, which must be provided before we are allowed to take our
event talk seriously (cf. Quine 1958: "No entity without
identity"). In this sense, different conceptions of events tend
to suggest different answers, and widely varying ones. In the
influential terminology of Thalberg (1971), we find at one extreme the
radical "unifiers", who take events to be as
coarse-grained as ordinary objects (Lemmon 1967; Quine 1985), while
the other extreme corresponds to the radical
"multipliers", who take events to be as fine-grained as
facts (Kim 1966; Goldman 1971; Chisholm 1971). In between we find
several moderate variants. Davidson (1969), for example, relies on a
criterion of causal extensionality: *x* and *y* are the
same event if and only if they have the same causes and the same
effects. This allows him to identify the killing of Caesar with his
stabbing while distinguishing between, say, the rotation and the
heating up of a metal ball that is simultaneously rotating and heating
up. (Strictly speaking, this criterion is formally circular, or
impredicative, if causes and effects are themselves treated as
events--as noted by Sher 1974, Wilson 1974, and others, including
Quine 1985--and Davidson 1985 eventually rejected it.) Other
"moderate" identity criteria deliver slightly different
verdicts, relying e.g. on mereological, locational, modal, or
hierarchical considerations, *inter alia* (Davis 1970; Thalberg
1971; Thomson 1971; Beardsley 1975; Brand 1977; Cleland 1991; Savellos
1992; Engel 1994; Unwin 1996; Jones 2013).



There are, however, philosophers who take questions of identity to be
mainly semantic questions--not metaphysical questions but
questions about the referents of our event-referring expressions. No
metaphysical theory, it is said, can settle the semantics of ordinary
event talk, hence there is no way of determining the truth or falsity
of an event identity statement exclusively on the basis of one's
metaphysical views. Which events a statement speaks of depends heavily
(more heavily than with ordinary material objects) on local context
and unprincipled intuitions (Bennett 1988). If so, then the whole
identity issue is undecidable, since one is demanding metaphysical
answers to questions that are in large part semantical.


### 3.3 Essence



Lastly, there is an array of questions that arise in relation to the
modal profile of events. Could Brutus's stabbing of
Caesar--*that* particular event that took place at the
ides of March, 44 BCE--have taken place at a different time?
Could it have taken place somewhere else than in the Senate at the
Curia of Pompey in Rome? Could it have been less violent than it was?
Could it have been something else than a stabbing, e.g., a poisoning?
Could it have been done by someone else than Brutus, or could it have
had a different victim than Caesar?



Questions such as these, and more generally questions about the
essential features of an event, arise naturally and play a crucial
role in the context of counterfactual thinking. Yet it appears that
the answers will depend crucially on one's metaphysical
standpoint. For example, philosophers who endorse a reductionist
metaphysics of events *a la* Kim (1966, 1969) tend to be
essentialist about all these features: if event *e* is an
exemplification of property *P* by objects o1,
..., o*n* at time *t*, then it is
necessarily so--and ditto for other reductionist metaphysics,
such as Lombard's (1979, 1986). On such views, the actual
occurrence of an event is a contingent matter, but it isn't a
contingent matter whether an actually occurring event has the features
it has. Others feel differently, arguing that a lot depends on how we
erect the relevant *de re/de dicto* distinctions in the way
events are individuated (Forbes 1985), to the point that some may even
think that events have *no* individual essences except perhaps
for their "rarified and elusive" *haecceities*
(Lycan 1987). (That events have *haecceities*, or thisnesses,
is itself a controversial matter, though see e.g. Berckmans 1995 and
Diekemper 2009.) Moreover, the questions themselves are open to a
number of qualifications. For example, with regard to time, we may
want to distinguish the question of whether an event could have
occurred wholly earlier or wholly later than it actually did (Lombard
1982) from the question of whether it could have occurred more quickly
or more slowly (Bennett 1987; Lombard 1992, 1995). With regard to an
event's participants, we may want to distinguish between, say,
an action's agent and its essential subject: perhaps
Brutus's stabbing of Caesar could not have been done by someone
else than Brutus, but surely the hand with which Brutus held the knife
played a different, more essential role than his left ear lobe
(Lombard 1981, 1986; Carter 1989). And so on.



There are also questions about an event's essence that arise
naturally by analogy with questions about the essence of other
entities, beginning with objects. For example, just as one may wonder
whether objects can be contingently identical, one may wonder whether
the relationship between, say, certain pain-events and the
corresponding brain-events is one of contingent identity (Teichman
1967; Feldman 1974; Maxwell 1979). Just as we may wonder whether
objects have their origin essentially, so we may wonder whether events
have their causes essentially (van Inwagen 1978; Carter 1979; Lombard
1986; Hughes 1994). Just as we may wonder whether objects have their
parts essentially, so we may ask whether events could have been
composed of different parts than the ones they actually have (Thomson
1977; Carter 1979; Hornsby 1997; Allen 2005; Daniels & Goswick
2017). And just as we may wonder whether an object's topological
structure and relations are essential to its being the object it is,
so we may wonder whether, say, a continuous event could have been
discontinuous, or whether two successive events, such as a process and
its culmination, are connected as a matter of necessity or only
contingently (Casati & Varzi 2000).



Finally, as with every question concerning matters of possibility and
necessity, a lot will depend on how we understand modality in the
first place. In the case of objects, different frameworks are
available to account for their *de re* modal profile, including
frameworks that differ significantly with regard to whether transworld
identification is a matter of strict transworld identity or a mere
counterpart relation. When it comes to events, similar options present
themselves and there is no obvious reason to think that they should be
handled in a parallel fashion. Kripke (1972), for instance, is a
transworld identity theorist in both regards but Lewis is a
counterpart theorist with regard to objects (1968) and a transworld
identity theorist with regard to events, at least in his account of
causation (1973). Only recently the counterpart-theoretic framework
has been endorsed for objects and events alike (Schaffer 2005;
McDonnell 2016; Kaiserman 2017). Among other things, it is claimed
that such a unified framework allows for a better account of the
context-sensitivity of much modal and causal talk, e.g. with reference
to various puzzles of preemption and redundant causation. Its
essentialist consequences, however, must be carefully evaluated: short
of assuming that every object and event could have at most one
counterpart in any world, the very idea that, say, the death of Caesar
is necessarily *of* Caesar becomes problematic (Hazen
1979).