Concept

Event (philosophy)

Overview

In philosophy, events are objects in time or instantiations of properties in objects. On some views, only changes in the form of acquiring or losing a property can constitute events, like the lawn's becoming dry. According to others, there are also events that involve nothing but the retaining of a property, e.g. the lawn's staying wet. Events are usually defined as particulars that, unlike universals, cannot repeat at different times. Processes are complex events constituted by a sequence of events. But even simple events can be conceived as complex entities involving an object, a time and the property exemplified by the object at this time. Traditionally, metaphysicians tended to emphasize static being over dynamic events. This tendency has been opposed by so-called process philosophy or process ontology, which ascribes ontological primacy to events and processes.

Overview adapted from Wikipedia (CC BY-SA 4.0; see the article history for authors).

In the original texts

Passages from public-domain books where Event (philosophy) is discussed.

It will be a group of events, all belonging to his experience, and having the following two properties: (1) any two of the events overlap; (2) no event outside the group overlaps with every member of the group. By a slightly more complicated but essentially similar method, we can define a point-instant in space-time as a group of events having two properties analogous to those used just now in defining an “instant”…
Bertrand Russell, Philosophy
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Such an eternal object will be an ingredient of one event under the guise, or aspect, of qualifying another event. There is a reciprocity of aspects, and there are patterns of aspects. Each event corresponds to two such patterns; namely, the pattern of aspects of other events which it grasps into its own unity, and the pattern of its aspects which other events severally grasp into their unities. Accordingly, a…
Alfred North Whitehead, Science and the modern world
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The continuity of nature is the continuity of events. This continuity is merely the name for the aggregate of a variety of properties of events in connexion with the relation of extension. In the first place, this relation is transitive; secondly, every event contains other events as parts of itself; thirdly every event is a part of other events; fourthly given any two finite events there are events each of which…
Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature The Tarner Lectures Delivered in Trinity College, November 1919
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It follows that an "event" is not a particular, but some universal of which there may be many instances. It follows also that an "event" must be something short of the whole state of the universe, since it is highly improbable that this will recur. What is meant by an "event" is something like striking a match, or dropping a penny into the slot of an automatic machine. If such an event is to recur, it must not be…
Bertrand Russell, Mysticism and Logic and Other Essays
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But as the event, or matter of fact, which is expressed by a verb, may be affirmed either of the person who speaks, or of the person who is spoken to, as well as of, some third person or object, it becomes necessary to fall upon some method of expressing these two peculiar relations of the event. In the English language this is commonly done, by prefixing, what are called the personal pronouns, to the general word…
Adam Smith, The Essays of Adam Smith
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Event (philosophy)

Overview

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