When Whitehead, Russell, Broad and advanced novel formulations of an event ontology, it was clear that they all believed science had outgrown the substance theory of Aristotle and his followers. As Russell points out, belief in substance seemed warranted as long as physics assumed one cosmic time and one cosmic space, but this view was radically altered with the arrival of the Einstein-Minkowski concept of space-time ([1927] 1934: 286).

In this chapter I examine the affinities and contrasts in the event theories advanced by Whitehead, Russell and Quine, all of which originate from the revolution in twentieth-century physics. The revisionary theory of events overthrows the descriptive theory, according to which events are dependent on substances. Events, under this new theory, are basic, and substance, as an ontological category, is eliminated.

WHITEHEAD'S EARLY ONTOLOGY OF EVENTS

Whitehead first introduced his theory of events in his Principles of Natural Knowledge in response to Maxwell and Einstein. He writes: ‘Modern speculative physics with its revolutionary theories concerning the natures of matter and of electricity has made urgent the question, What are the ultimate data of science?’ (1919: v). This enquiry takes the form of a classification of natural entities that are posited for knowledge in sense awareness (1920: 49). The thesis he advances for the unification of scientific knowledge is that

‘The whole object of these lectures’, he writes in The Concept of Nature, ‘is to enforce the doctrine that space and time spring from a common root, and that the ultimate fact of experience is a space-time fact’ (1920: 132). In The Principle of Relativity, Whitehead called this attempt to unify the natural sciences under one concept ‘pan-physics’ (1922: 4).