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Articles

Events and Things

Michael Bulley on whether Events can happen Now … and other metaphysical conundra.

The following thoughts were prompted by an article by the Oxford philosopher, Rom Harre, entitled ‘Some reflections on the individuation of events’, which appeared in the journal, International Studies in the Philosophy of Science (Vol. 5, No.1, 1991). As I enjoy hearing the theories of physicists and am interested in linguistic analysis, I was sympathetic to Harre’s relating linguistic ideas to scientific ones: he writes, for example, in one of his simpler passages,“… a change of tense is not a signal of a change in the status of an event.” Happy though I was with this approach, yet the more I thought I understood the author’s thesis, the more I had a nagging dissatisfaction with the use of the word ‘event’.

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