A WORLD OF EVENTS

The expansion of the universe is an event, but so is the hurricane off the coast of California, the traffic accident outside my window, and the dance of subatomic particles in my cup of tea. So in addition to galaxies, bodies of land and sea, automobiles and cups of tea, there appear to be activities, happenings or episodes; but do these form a distinct class of entity that we identify as events? And if so, what is the status of events in our general theory of the world? These are questions of ontology, the most basic theoretical enquiry into the nature of existence, and the subject of the present work.

Some philosophers argue that events must be recognised along with material substances. The tragic explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, for example, is as much an entity as the space shuttle Challenger itself or the astronauts. Others contend that only material substances should be admitted to our ontology, while events have a sort of secondary or dependent status. In this view, the assassination could not occur without there being in the first instance an assassin, a victim and a bullet. Still others claim that people, places and things are events too, even though they do not seem to fit our ordinary conception of events. According to this view, events are not one kind of individual that exists in a world with other kinds of individuals; they are the only true individuals in the world. Physical objects in this view turn out to be qualifications of events. The traffic accident is an event but so are the car, the driver and the fly on the dashboard. Common sense tells us that this is stretching things a bit too far, but as we shall see, modern physics suggests otherwise.

Early in the twentieth century, three Cambridge philosophers, Alfred North Whitehead, Bertrand Russell and C. D. Broad, became champions of event ontologies that were thought to be compatible with emerging relativity theory. At the mid-century mark, W. V. Quine, at the Cambridge on the other side of the Atlantic, developed this view for the same reason.