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Full Idea
Davidson claims that we require the existence of events in order to make sense of a) action statements, b) causal statements, c) explanation, d) the mind-body problem, and e) the logic of adverbial modification.
Gist of Idea
We need events for action statements, causal statements, explanation, mind-and-body, and adverbs
Source
report of Donald Davidson (The Individuation of Events [1969], Intro IIb) by Craig Bourne - A Future for Presentism
Book Ref
Bourne,Craig: 'A Future for Presentism' [OUP 2006], p.7
A Reaction
Events are a nice shorthand, but I don't like them in a serious ontology. Prior says there objects and what happens to them; Kim reduces events to other things. Processes are more clearly individuated than events.
18914 | Davidson controversially proposed to quantify over events [Davidson, by Engelbretsen] |
9843 | You can't identify events by causes and effects, as the event needs to be known first [Dummett on Davidson] |
8278 | The claim that events are individuated by their causal relations to other events is circular [Lowe on Davidson] |
14602 | Events can only be individuated causally [Davidson, by Schaffer,J] |
14004 | We need events for action statements, causal statements, explanation, mind-and-body, and adverbs [Davidson, by Bourne] |