Events and Non-events
Dorothy M. Emmet · Palgrave Macmillan UK eBooks · 1984
The 1920s saw philosophers (for instance, Russell, Whitehead, Broad) recommend that events be seen not only as constituents in the world but as the only constituents. They wanted to get away from the metaphysics which had come down from Aristotle, where the primary constituents were substances sustaining attributes. Their event ontologies were worked out in the context of Relativity Theory, where ‘events’ were four-dimensional units, possibly of Space-Time. Things and even persons were to be seen as characters of events or series of events: Socrates was a long Socratic event, or a Socratic stretch of Space-Time. So in this ontology, events are not one kind of particular in a world which also contains other kinds of particulars. Everything is an event. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.