Events: Their Metaphysics and Semantics

Abstract

Jonathan Bennett's lucid and incisive Events and Their Names I addresses a wide range of issues concerning the of events and the semantics of the language in which we talk about them. In this brief discussion, I will focus on Bennett's distinction between the of events and the semantics of event descriptions-in particular, his conception of the relation between the two within the instantiation account of events. According to Bennett, the metaphysics of events is that they are tropes, or property exemplifications (as I have called them elsewhere2) by substances a time. Alternatively, we can say, with Bennett, that an event is a instantiation at a zone, where are spatiotemporal regions. It isn't clear just what properties are such that their instantiations by zones are to count as events; in particular, whether certain relational properties (say, becoming a widow) can generate events is unclear. At any rate, the core idea about events that Bennett supports is that events are instantiations of properties by concrete spatiotemporal objects. That is their metaphysical constitution; and that is how events, as an ontological kind, are related to other kinds-properties, substances, and times, or properties and zones. F9r the theory implies the following supervenience thesis, what I take to be the central metaphysical consequence of this conception of events: once all the facts about what substances have what properties what times are fixed, all the facts about events-their existence and properties-are thereby fixed. I Given that being a exemplification is the true nature of events, what are their criteria of identity? Bennett doesn't think much of such