Are events structured wholes?

Alfonso Romero Zuniga

Universität Tübingen

Events are central in both our scientific inquiry and our everyday life. But what are events anyway? Are they fundamental? In this talk, I try to answer these questions by arguing that events are four-dimensional structured wholes, composed of matter and form.
I begin by examining our “”manifest image”” of events. This image encompasses both
our common-sense understanding and the scientific conception of events, which highlights features like change, speaker dependence, and internal structure. Based on this, I propose a neo-Aristotelian image for events, treating them as substances –entities constituted by matter and form.
In order to make sense of events’ material parts, I propose the idea of instantaneous
temporal parts, which though standard in philosophical theories, seem alien to our everyday conception. A helpful analogy to grasp this idea is to imagine them as snapshots. For every moment an event extends to, there is a snapshot, a temporal part, of that moment. On the other hand, the idea of form requires further elaboration. Form refers to the specific arrangement of parts that determines the kind of event it is. For this, we utilize the idea of a structure with kind-sensitive slots. The core idea here is to analyze the concept of parthood
through the concept of slot-filling. Slots represent the formal spaces that organize the
components of a whole in a precise manner. In the case of events, these slots are filled by instantaneous temporal parts of a specific kind.
This neo-Aristotelian perspective on events not only sheds light on their nature but
also offers insights into ongoing debates within metaphysics and beyond. The talk concludes by exploring how this framework can contribute to discussions within the metaphysics of events, such as event individuation, the distinction events/processes, but also the consequences for other disciplines such as process biology or the linguistics of event talk.

Chair: Aleksandar Draskovic

Time: September 13th, 14:00 – 14:30

Location: HS E.002