Events - An Annotated Bibliography

Introduction

This bibliography is concerned with recent literature on the nature of events and the place they occupy in our conceptual scheme. The subject has received extensive consideration in the philosophical debate over the last few decades, with ramifications reaching far into the domains of allied disciplines such as linguistics and the cognitive sciences. At the same time, the literature is so wide and widely scattered that it has become very difficult to keep track of every line of development. Our hope is that this work will prove useful to overcome that difficulty.

Content and scope of the bibliography

We have chosen Hans Reichenbach’s 1947 pioneering contribution on the logical form of action sentences as a starting point (the other acknowledged milestone being the publication of an influential paper by Donald Davidson exactly 20 years later), and we headed for a review of the extensive literature that followed in the fifty years thereafter. For convenient reference, we have also included a short Appendix with some early works referred to in much of the literature.

The focus is represented by philosophical literature devoted explicitly to such questions as the following:

- Are events a kind of entity?

- If so, what are they? (For instance, are events particulars or universals, concrete or abstract?)

- How do they differ from other kinds of entity? (For instance, how do they differ from material objects, if at all? How do they differ from states of affairs, if at all?)

- What are their identity and individuation criteria?

- Are there any substantial differences between various kinds of event? (For instance, are actions a kind of event? What is the difference between mental and physical events, if any? Are facts, states, processes species of one single event category?)

- What position do events occupy in the causal network? How do they fit in the spatio-temporal framework?

- How does reference to or quantification over events affect the semantics of ordinary language? How does it feature in the construction of formal semantic models?

- How do semantic issues interact with metaphysical ones?

In addition, we have also included relevant entries from various collateral fields: the philosophy of action; the philosophy of mind; the philosophy of space, time, and causation; the logic of tense and time, and the treatment of tense and aspect in linguistics; situation theory; knowledge representation; planning and temporal reasoning in artificial intelligence. All of these are areas of research in which the notion of an event arguably has played and still plays a prominent role (whether positively, i.e., as something to be relied on for a proper treatment of the core issues, or negatively, as a concept to be eliminated from unadulterated philosophical or otherwise technical vocabulary). However, it would have hardly been possible to include every piece of work dealing in some way or another with the notion of an event. In regard to those collateral areas, the present bibliography is therefore only meant to give some indication of the main trends and contributions, but aims at no completeness. (In some cases, for instance, we have included anthologies and collective works, without itemising each relevant essay.) This limitation is even more drastic with respect to other allied areas such as psychology, decision and probability theory, or the philosophy of history: here too events play an important role, but it would have been impossible to give a reasonable coverage of this role without stretching the relevant parameters beyond bearable limits. Even so, the list includes some 1850 entries by over 900 authors, and gives a measure of the importance that the topic has registered in the literature.

The philosophical co-ordinates

The entries are listed in alphabetical/chronological order by author. This means the bibliography is offered as raw material: there is no topical subcategorization. Such a categorization might have been effective in serving the purpose of a guided tour through the literature, but it would have also incorporated a conspicuous amount of arbitrariness, which could have only been mitigated (and then only partially) at the cost of overwhelming repetitions and cross-indexing. We have preferred keeping this to a minimum. Our annotations along with the comprehensive apparatus of subject and name indexes included in the last part of the volume should help provide quick access to the topics of interest.

Some major guidelines, however, have been followed in the compilation. They correspond to four main co-ordinates within which it seems possible to stake out--at least in part--the multiform spectrum of philosophical positions contemplated in the literature:

1. Realists vs. non-realists. A first obvious co-ordinate, corresponding to a major line of research, is the degree of reality that different theories ascribe to events. On one side is the realist position, viewing events as part of our basic ontological inventory--objects of reference and quantification. This is the view advocated by Reichenbach and Davidson and accepted by the majority of authors (though sometimes for very different reasons and within the framework of radically different metaphysical conceptions). On the other side we find the non-realist’s position: it denies existence to events in favor of ontological parsimony, arguing that every seemingly event-committing sentence can in principle be paraphrased in terms of event-free ones. This view has been defended, for instance, by T. Horgan, R. Trenholme, and B. Aune in the 70’s, and underlies much of the work in the field of adverbial modification pioneered by R. Clark and R. Montague. In between these two opposite positions are those authors who avoid the language of reduction, but also deny that events and objects are co-ordinate and equally basic. We find here philosophers in the tradition of P. F. Strawson, but also authors such as J. Kim, L. B. Lombard, and J. Bennett, who maintain some form of dependency or supervenience of events over material substances or entities of other sorts. We find also philosophers who defend the primacy of events over objects: this is a view that is rooted in the early work of B. Russell and A. N. Whitehead, and which has been explored, e.g., in some works of R. M. Martin.

2. Particularists vs. recurrentists; concretists vs. abstractists. A second way of scanning the variety of metaphysical theories of events is with reference to the distinction between the conception of events as spatio-temporal particulars versus their conception as recurrable entities, entities which can occur more than once. The latter view is exemplified by R. Chisholm’s early writings, according to which events are fact-like entities--a species of states of affairs, differing from propositions only in their being time-bound. The opposite, particularist view is most explicitly exemplified by Davidson’s own seminal writings as well as by such authors as M. Brand, P. van Inwagen, or D. H. Mellor. A better picture, however, is obtained by further distinguishing a continuum of particularist positions based on the degree of "concreteness" that they assign to events, i.e., the degree to which they view events as soaking up the content of the spatio-temporal region at which they occur. At one extreme, authors like W. V. O. Quine push the concretist conception as far as possible by denying any categorial distinction among spatio-temporal entities and eventually assimilating events to material objects. The other extreme is not explicitly represented by any author, but corresponds ideally to the view that there is no lower bound on the abstractness (lack of content) of events. In between these two extreme positions we have a variety of intermediate conceptions, corresponding to the majority of official positions: each of them sees events as spatio-temporal entities, but with various constraints on the lower limit on how concrete an event can be. For instance, Davidsonian events are all rather thick, though never as thick as to coincide with the material objects with which they may happen to be co-localized; Kimean events, by contrast, may be highly abstract, though presumably never as abstract as to leave their spatio-temporal regions entirely unqualified: events are exemplifications of properties by objects at times (i.e., they are tropes, on some recent variants of this account), and the constituent objects and properties impose some constraints on what can possibly go on at the relevant spatio-temporal location. Lastly, it is fair to add that a number of authors--mostly concerned with the application of the event concept to problems in the semantics of natural language, the logic of temporal discourse, or the representation of temporal knowledge--do not take any stand with respect to the concrete-abstract continuum, treating events as somewhat underspecified "bare" entities subject to first-order reference and quantification.

3. Unifiers vs. multipliers. The above classification pattern is closely related to a third, rather popular way of approaching the field of event theories, which is based on the underlying identity and individuation criteria. (Succeeding in making sense of assertions or denials of identity between entities of some sort is often considered a minimal prerequisite for the viability of a theory resting on the idea that there are entities of that sort, and in the case of events the issue has received particular attention.) Again we have here a wide spectrum of theories, though their exact assessment is often made difficult by the uncertain boundary between ontological and semantic issues of identity. At one end we have the "unifiers" (to use I. Thalberg’s fortunate term), initially represented by Anscombe and Davidson. This is the view that a single event can be referred to by significantly distinct linguistic expressions. In its most radical version, this view turns into Quine’s, which makes events so concrete as to leave no room for two events to occupy exactly the same spatio-temporal region. At the other end of the spectrum we have the "multipliers", who emphasize dissimilarities in meaning from one event-referring expression to another, inferring corresponding ontological distinctions. This view is chiefly associated with the writings of J. Kim and A. I. Goldman, and is typically affiliated with a conception of events as supervening on their participants. In between we have various intermediate positions. Generally speaking, these agree in their heart with the unifier’s intuitions, but acknowledge the legitimacy of various concerns underlying the multiplier’s approach. Among others, we find here accounts based on the part-whole structure of events (J. J. Thomson, I. Thalberg) or their modal properties (M. Brand, D. K. Lewis). Some theorists, such as J. Bennett, also subscribe in this regard to a sort of indeterminacy thesis, and regard the whole identity issue as resulting from impossible attempts to bridge the chasm between semantic and metaphysic issues.

4. Events and semantics. Finally, the fourth co-ordinate has to do with language, and more specifically with the role played by events within the framework of semantic theorizing. Although some authors would deny that there is any semantic way to argue for the existence of events, others view events as comprising a necessary category of entities to be posited next to other categories (such as material objects) as the referents of quantified variables visible only in deep grammatical structure. This is the Davidsonian line of thought, leading to what T. Parsons has labelled "sub-atomic semantics"; but it is also the line of thought that grew out of the independent work of Z. Vendler and A. Kenny in the analysis of sentence nominals, leading to an extensive literature in the semantic account of Aktionsarten (action types) and related natural language phenomena. Though sometimes the focus of a vehement debate, such lines of reasoning have come to define an independent dimension within which most theories can now be appraised and compared to one another. Also in the cognitive sciences, and particularly in the domain of representation tools for Artificial Intelligence, the interplay between logical semantics and event ontology has been the battlefield of several proposals and developments.

Format and indexing criteria

In addition to the admittedly vague limits set by these concerns, the scope and range of the bibliography is defined by the typology of the literature that we have surveyed.

There are four main types of entry: monographs; journal articles; articles in collective volumes (including conference and workshop proceedings); collective volumes (including conference and workshop proceedings). In all cases, as already mentioned, all entries have been ordered alphabetically by the surname of the author(s) or (in the case of a collective volume) of the editor(s). Works by the same author(s) or editor(s) are listed chronologically under the surname; these are followed, again in chronological order, by their co-authored or co-edited works. (Co-authors or co-editors are always listed alphabetically by the first author/editor. There are no individual cross-references under the names of the second or subsequent authors, since the Index of Authors allows the user to locate all works by the same author. To facilitate quick author reference, a special Index to Second and Subsequent Authors, listing the names of all people appearing as second or subsequent authors or editors of titles registered as main entries, has also been included.) For the purpose of alphabetic ordering, hyphens and diacritics (including diaeresis) have been disregarded and unhyphenated complex surnames have been treated as single units. (This applies also to surnames beginning with ‘von’,‘van’, and the like.) If more than one work by the same author(s) or editor(s) has the same publication year, lower case letters are added in alphabetic order (as in ‘1967a’) to avoid ambiguity in case of cross-reference. Cross-references are always given by indicating the author(s) or editor(s) surname(s) (with initials, if necessary) followed by the year of publication of the referred title (with alphabetic tag, if applicable).

In addition to the above four categories, we have included some doctoral dissertations which have played a prominent role in the literature, but no attempt has been made to give a full coverage to this category. Occasionally (and with the same selection criteria) we have also included papers that appeared as technical reports, but unpublished manuscripts have been systematically omitted.

Some attempt has also been made to include reviews or references to reprints or later editions of books listed in the bibliography. Reviews are treated as regular entries, under the reviewer’s name. (A cross-reference is provided in the annotation under the reviewed work.) Reprints or later editions are listed together with the original edition, separated by a colon and in chronological order. (In case of ambiguity, page numbers of citations and excerpts must be taken to refer to the most recent reprint or edition.) Non-original editions in languages other than English are not included (though we always give the English translation of a title originally published in another language; in that case the translation is treated as a reprint, following the criteria indicated above).

As for the annotations, they are mostly given in the form of a short summary, sometimes accompanied by quotations from particularly significant passages. Inevitably, this may reflect our personal interpretation. Moreover, many articles or books registered here are not devoted specifically to the topic of events, and our annotations are correspondingly partial: we remark on the authors’ views only as far as events are concerned. Other annotations are simply cross-references, or excerpts from the authors’ own abstracts (as appearing at the beginning of an article, or as reported in The Philosopher’s Index). In any case, it is understood that the length of the annotation is never and by no means intended to be indicative of the value of the work. (We have tried to keep every annotation to a maximum of a dozen lines.)

For ease of reference, we have avoided all abbreviations in the titles of journals, collective volumes (such as conference proceedings), or publishers. Thus virtually each entry is self-contained. However, in the case of an article included in a collective volume which is listed as an independent entry (typically because of the number of relevant articles or because its publication represents a contribution of its own), the entry is given in abbreviated form by providing a cross-reference.

Many people helped us with this work in many ways. We would especially like to thank Andrea Bonomi and Bernard Katz. We are also grateful to an anonymous referee of the Philosophy Documentation Center for providing detailed comments on an earlier draft, and to George Leaman for his support during the final stages of this work.

We offer this bibliography together with our apologies for any omission and for any error of fact or interpretation that might have slipped in. We anticipate our thanks to anyone who will send us integrations, comments, corrections, or suggestions that might help us improve this work in view of an updated edition.

An Annotated Bibliography 1947 to 1997

1985 ‘Einzelding- und Ereignisontologie’ [‘The Ontology of Particulars and of Events’, in German], Zeitschrift für philosophische Forschung, 39, 157-85.

On treating individual events as part of our basic ontological inventory. "Any such attempt may neither rely simply on scientific results, nor consist of suggestions to improve the scheme already at our disposal. On the other hand, there is the danger of falling into a positivism of factual use, a positivism of ordinary language. These are the Scylla and Charybdis of a philosophy of events" [pp. 160-61]. Includes a discussion of the views of Davidson, Quine, Strawson, and Moravcsik.

1985 On Verbs and Time, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst.

Argues that "just as change and causation can be viewed conceptually as either instantaneous or continuous, inchoatives and process verbs whose meanings involve such notions appear in natural language as either event or process type verbs" [Abstract]. Includes a discussion of various issues in the semantics of the English progressive.

1986 ‘Verbs of Change, Causation, and Time’, Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Report No. CSLI-86-50.

Building on Dowty (1979), observes that the categories of inchoatives and causatives are not of uniform aspectual type. In particular, accomplishments are not to be identified with causatives, since there are causatives that meet tests for process verbs (as in ‘The man walked his dog for an hour’).

1975a ‘Causation, Transparency and Emphasis’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 5, 1-23.

Causation is not relational, because this would imply that causal statements are referentially transparent in cause- and effect-positions, and they are not. Compare Dretske (1977) and Kim (1977).

1975b ‘The Object of Explanation’, in S. Körner, ed., Explanation, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 1-45.

A general analysis of such sentences as "Plato explained why Socrates died" or "Plato explained why Socrates died from drinking hemlock", favoring the view that the object of explanation is a complex consisting of an event, a description, and a question (or an indirect interrogative). It is observed that the controversy on event identity rests on a confusion. "Davidson is talking about one sort of thing and Kim and Goldman about another. There is the event of Socrates’ death, which, as Davidson urges, can be variously described as Socrates’ death or as Socrates’ death from drinking hemlock. But there is also what might be called the state of affairs which consists of Socrates’ having the property of having died, and this is different from the state of affairs of Socrates’ having the property of having died from drinking hemlock" [pp. 8-9].

1979 ‘The Causal Relation’, in P. A. French, T. Uehling, and H. K. Wettstein, eds. (1979), pp. 369-86; incorporated in Achinstein (1983), Chapter 6.

A defense of Achinstein (1975a) against various objections, including those of Levin (1976), Dretske (1977), and Kim (1977).

A theory of the explaining act, of the resulting explanation (the act’s "product"), and its ontological status. Includes a chapter on the nature of the causation, based on (1975a, 1979).

1965 ‘Aristotle’s Distinction Between Energeia and Kinêsis’, in R. Bambrough, ed., New Essays on Plato and Aristotle, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 121-41.

Classic reference for a comparison between Aristotle’s kinêsis/energeia distinction and the event typologies of Ryle (1949), Kenny (1963), and Vendler (1957). Detailed criticisms in Penner (1970). Related material in Graham (1980) and Mourelatos (1993).

1986 ‘Intention and Intentional Action: The Simple View’, Mind & Language, 1, 281-301.

A defense of the view that the intention to do an action is necessary for doing it intentionally.

1989 ‘The Role of Intention in Intentional Action’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 19, 511-32.

Defends a "control model" of intentional action and compares it with the competing model of Searle (1979, 1983).

1992 ‘The Intention/Volition Debate’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 22, 323-38.

"There is no need to incorporate volition--construed as something other than intending, trying, sensory feedback, or a combination thereof--into one’s theory of action" [p. 337].

1967 ‘On Seeing Bodily Movements as Actions’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 4, 222-30.

"Perception by a person of what another is doing amounts, in the usual case, to perceiving a pattern of ‘fine shades of behavior’, each itself an (atomic) action unmistakably present, not just an ‘observed movement’" [p. 230].

1967 ‘A Logical Condition for the Redescription of Actions in Terms of Their Consequences’, The Journal of Value Inquiry, 1, 132-34.

1981 ‘An Interval-Based Representation of Temporal Knowledge’, Proceedings of the 7th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-81), Vol. 1, Vancouver: IJCAI [Morgan Kaufmann], pp. 221-26.

One of the first attempts--and a very influential one--to incorporate temporal reasoning into Artificial Intelligence (see also McDermott 1982). Based on a many-sorted predicate calculus with variables ranging over an ontology including properties, time intervals, and events (these latter being assumed as primitive and said to occur over intervals of time).

1983 ‘Maintaining Knowledge about Temporal Intervals’, Communications of the ACM, 26, 823-43; reprinted in D. Weld and J. de Kleer, eds., Readings in Qualitative Reasoning About Physical Systems, San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1990, pp. 361-72.

An interval-based temporal logic (as in 1981). There are no time instants, for no event is truly instantaneous: "there seems to be a strong intuition that, given an event, we can always ‘turn up the magnification’ and look at its structure" [p. 363].

1984 ‘Towards a General Theory of Action and Time’, Artificial Intelligence, 23, 123-54; reprinted in J. F. Allen, J. Hendler, and A. Tate, eds. (1990), pp. 464-79.

An extension of the theory put forward in (1981, 1983). Treats processes as an intermediate category between events and properties (they may occur over subintervals, but not over every subinterval). See Sadri (1987) and Galton (1990) for critical examinations.

1991a ‘Temporal Reasoning and Planning’, in J. F. Allen, H. A. Kautz, R. N. Pelavin, and J. D. Tenenberg (1991), pp. 2-68.

An extensive survey of the main problems and lines of research in the field of temporal reasoning (including a review of Allen’s own research) with emphasis on applications to planning.

1991b ‘Time and Time Again: The Many Ways to Represent Time’, International Journal of Intelligent Systems, 6 [Special Issue on "Temporal Reasoning", Part A, K. M. Ford and F. D. Anger, eds.], 341-55.

Reviews some AI techniques for representing time. "Can one assume that a timestamp can be assigned to each event, or barring that, that the events are fully ordered? Or can we only assume that a partial ordering of events is known? Can events be simultaneous? Can they overlap in time and yet not be simultaneous? If they are not instantaneous, do we know the duration of events? Different answers to each of these questions allow very different representations of time" [p. 341, Abstract].

1994 ‘Actions and Events in Interval Temporal Logic’, Journal of Logic and Computation, 4, 531-79.

Presents a formalism--based on an interval temporal logic--for representing events and actions, viewed as "primarily linguistic or cognitive in nature" [p. 533]. (They are the way by which rational agents classify patterns of change. "The world does not really contain events" [ibid.].) The presentation includes a formal axiomatization of the structure of time periods as well as of the relationships between actions and events and their effects.

1985 ‘A Common-Sense Theory of Time’, Proceedings of the 9th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-85), Vol. 1, Los Angeles: IJCAI [Morgan Kaufmann], pp. 528-31.

Proposes a theory of commonsense knowledge about time exploiting the interval-based theory of Allen (1981, 1983, 1984).

1989 ‘Moments and Points in an Interval-Based Temporal Logic’, Computational Intelligence, 5, 225-38.

Presents a new axiomatization of the theory of Allen and explores the relationships between interval-based and point-based theories. "The interval-based theory starts with intuitions about time as reflected in natural language. Time in natural language is intimately associated with events. When an event occurs, it defines a time. Temporal ordering is simply an abstraction derived from the ordering of event occurrences". Still, the theory "maintains a distinction between events and times. Fort instance, in an event logic [without explicit time, such as Kamp’s 1979], two events may be exactly simultaneous and yet not be equal" [p. 225].

Includes J. F. Allen (1984), Hanks and McDermott (1987), Lifschitz (1987a), and McDermott (1978).

A comprehensive reader on planning and related AI applications. Includes J. F. Allen (1991a), Kautz (1991), and Pelavin (1991).

Makes use of a bounded/nonbounded aspectual distinction germane in many ways to the accomplishment/activity (Vendler 1957) or performance/ activity (Kenny 1963) distinctions.

1972 ‘Response to Weitz’s "The Concept of a Human Action"’, Philosophical Exchange, 1, 239-47.

A criticism of Weitz (1972): one should not try to set the problems of action theory by seeking general application criteria for the ordinary term ‘human action’. The term ‘action’ is often a mass noun.

A criticism of Horgan’s (1978) eliminative strategy. In addition to specific objections, it is argued that "the basic issue between Horgan and his opponents is really a conflict between competing principles of parsimony [...] Horgan will brandish Occam’s Razor and deplore the proliferation of entities [...] But Horgan’s opponent might deplore analyses which involve the proliferation of special, nontruthfunctional sentential connectives such as Horgan’s causal connective and generational connective. The opponent can brandish what might be called Russell’s Razor: Do not multiply logical connectives or logical apparatus in general beyond necessity" [pp. 306-7].

1995 Time, Space and Movement: Meaning and Knowledge in the Sensible World. Proceedings of the 5th International Workshop, Toulouse: COREP.

Includes Amsili and Le Draoulec (1995), Casati (1995), Glasbey (1995), Krifka (1995), Reboul (1995), C. S. Smith (1995), and Verkuyl (1995b).

1995 ‘Contribution to the Event Negation Problem’, in P. Amsili, M. Borillo, and L. Vieu, eds. (1995), Part A, pp. 17-29.

On the treatment of negated event sentences within the framework of Discourse Representation Theory.

1972 Aktionalität im Deutschen: Eine Untersuchung unter Vergleich mit dem Russischen Aspektsystem [Actionality in German: An Investigation with Reference to the Aspectual System of Russian, in German], Uppsala: Acta Universitatis Upsaliensis.

Extensive discussion of aspect-related phenomena. In relation to the activity-accomplishment (performance) distinction of Vendler (1957) and Kenny (1963), a twofold distinction is examined between situations, processes, actions that are directed toward attaining a goal (‘John was writing a letter’ versus ‘John was writing’) and those which actually reach the goal (‘John wrote a letter’ versus ‘John was writing a letter’). See Dahl (1981) for discussion.

1983 The Explanation of Actions: A Critical Analysis of Donald Davidson’s Theory, Doctoral Dissertation, State University of New York at Albany.

An attempt to provide a coherent systematic account of Davidson’s theory of explaining human actions in the context of his theory of meaning and truth.

1968 Action and Bodily Movement, Doctoral Dissertation, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

A comparison of Anscombe’s and Davidson’s thesis of the redescribability of actions, pointing out some differences. "We can say that we have one action under different descriptions if the descriptions are related as descriptions of means to descriptions of ends. It is only when this important qualification is left out that what [Anscombe] says can be made to look artificially like what Davidson says" [p. 253]. Davidson’s view is open to objections that Anscombe’s escapes.

1977/8 ‘How Basic Are Basic Actions?’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 78, 195-213.

Argues that the only philosophically interesting notion of basicness is that of "causal basicness", and that the notion of a basic action can play no useful role in an account of action and agency.

"An action is not called intentional in virtue of any extra feature which exists when it is performed" [p. 28]. What distinguishes intentional from non-intentional actions is that the former are "actions to which a certain sense of the question ‘Why?’ is given application". It is argued that "a single action can have many different descriptions, e.g. ‘sawing a plank’, ‘sawing oak’, ‘sawing one of Smith’s planks’, ‘making a squeaky noise with the saw’, ‘making a great deal of sawdust’ and so on", and that an agent "may know that he is doing a thing under one description, and not under another" [p. 11]. An influential point of view.

1963 ‘The Two Kinds of Error in Action’, The Journal of Philosophy, 60, 393-401.

Consent is always consent to something "under a description". Thus, if somebody signed a property transfer, it is possible that "under the description ‘signing the document presented by so and so’ there was consent to what took place; under the description ‘signing a property transfer’ there was not" [p. 393].

1969a ‘Causality and Extensionality’, The Journal of Philosophy, 66, 152-59; reprinted in Anscombe (1981b), pp. 173-79.

A discussion of the "slingshot" argument. "I find it harmless to say that causal statements are intensional. But our considerations lead to raising the following question: What is at stake in maintaining or denying that an effect is properly described or presented in a proposition? [...] Whatever it is, in this issue one side is probably correctly represented by the insistence on the proposition but I suspect (my hunch is) that the other side is the right one, but is not correctly represented by objecting to the presentation in a proposition" [pp. 178-79].

1969b ‘Before and After’, The Philosophical Review, 73, 3-24; reprinted in Anscombe (1981b), pp. 180-95.

Includes a discussion of events as the terms of the two temporal relations before and after and an analysis of those relations in the case of instantaneous events. "Though we cannot think of an instantaneous event falling within our experience that is not a terminus of something that takes time, we can think of plenty of events that are such termini". Thus, "Russell [...] was wrong in saying that no instantaneous events occur within our experience, because he had a false picture of what that would be like, like people who suppose that a point that could be seen would be an extensionless dot" [p. 193].

1979a ‘Under a Description’, Noûs, 13, 219-33; reprinted in Anscombe (1981b), pp. 208-19, and in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 303-17.

Replies to several objections ("misunderstandings") put forward against the view of (1957), according to which one and the same event may be singled out by different descriptions. Authors discussed include A. I. Goldman, D. Bennett, and J. J. Thomson. Moreover, it is pointed out that "while I am in agreement with Davidson that there are many descriptions of an action, we part company when it comes to his ‘theory of event-identity’. Or again, his theory of adverbial modification. This really doesn’t go at all well with the idea of many descriptions. For the adverbial modification that suits one verb may not consort well with another, and yet the two verbs may occur in different descriptions of the same action" [p. 232].

1979b ‘Chisholm on Action’, Grazer philosophische Studien, 7/8 [special issue "Essays in the Philosophy of R. M. Chisholm", also published as E. Sosa, ed. (1979)], 205-13.

On how Chisholm’s theory of action can deal with the fact that one can produce neuro-physiological changes by moving a limb.

1981b The Collected Philosophical Papers of G. E. M. Anscombe. Volume 2: Metaphysics and the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

1983 ‘The Causation of Action’, in C. Ginet and S. Shoemaker, eds., Knowledge and Mind. Philosophical Essays, New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 174-90.

1987 ‘Attributions of Intentional Action’, Philosophical Studies, 51, 311-23.

Argues that Davidson’s (1967a) analysis of adverbs as predicates of events can be extended to intensional adverbs such as ‘intentionally’ as long as one is a realist about mental representations.

1994 ‘The Inadequacy of Anomalous Monism as a Realist Theory of Mind’, in Preyer, G., Siebelt, F., and Ulfig, A., eds. (1994), pp. 223-53.

Argues that Davidson’s principle of the anomalism of the mental rests on "a profoundly anti-naturalistic--indeed, anti-realistic--conception of the mental", and that anomalous monism is therefore "unable to satisfy minimal desiderata of an adequate naturalistic mentalism" [p. 224].

1976 ‘Mereology, Time, Action and Meaning’, in B. Kantscheider, ed., Sprache und Erkenntnis, Innsbruck: AMOE, pp. 189-233.

1982 ‘Some Remarks on Ontology’, in J. Agassi and R. S. Cohen, eds., Scientific Philosophy Today. Essays in Honor of Mario Bunge, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 1-44.

Critical study of Bunge’s view on ontology as presented in (1977b). Includes a discussion of Bunge’s theory of processes and events [pp. 34ff].

1979 ‘Mental Particulars, Mental Events, and the Bundle Theory’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 9, 109-20.

Regards experiences as events so as to argue inter alia that the bundle theory does not imply the possibility of experiences apart from experiencers.

1974 ‘A New Approach to the Logical Theory of Actions and Causality’, in S. Stenlund, ed., Logical Theory and Semantic Analysis. Essays Dedicated to Stig Kanger on His Fiftieth Birthday, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 73-91.

A formal theory of the bringing-about relation. Germane to the work by Pörn (1971, 1974).

1976 ‘Formal Semantics for Verb Tenses as Analyzed by Reichenbach’, in T. van Dijk, ed., Pragmatics of Language and Literature, Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp. 229-36.

A reconstruction of Reichenbach’s (1947) analysis of English tenses within the framework of a "double-indexed" semantics.

1977 ‘On the Analysis of Some Accomplishment and Activity Verbs’, in C. Rohrer, ed. (1977), pp. 31-65.

An analysis of compound accomplishment and activity verb phrases (in the sense of Vendler 1957), such as ‘to draw a circle’ or ‘to push a cart’, using the system of tense logic first given in Åqvist and Guenthner (1978).

1978 ‘Fundamentals of a Theory of Verb Aspect and Events within the Setting of an Improved Tense Logic’, in F. Guenthner and C. Rohrer, eds., Studies in Formal Semantics: Intentionality, Temporality, Negation, Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp. 167-99.

The first part develops a formal semantic account of tense logic; on that basis, in the second part the notion of an event is subjected to an analytic treatment, including a classification of so-called finite generic events and a formal account of the trichotomy of the beginning, the middle, and the end of any event. An extended language with operators corresponding to such locutions as ‘it begins to be the case that ... by its being the case that---" is also presented.

1966 Critical Notice of R. Taylor (1965), Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 44, 231-40.

1975 ‘Beliefs and Desires as Causes of Action: A Reply to Donald Davidson’, Philosophical Papers, 4, 1-8.

An attempt to solve various problems arising from the view that beliefs and desires are causes of actions. Discussion of Davidson’s (1963) statement of that view.

1993 ‘A World of States of Affairs’, in J. Tomberlin, ed., Philosophy of Language (Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 7), Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, pp. 429-40.

The world (=space-time manifold) is a vaste assemblage of states of affairs, having individuals and properties as constituents.

1993 ‘A Unified Framework for Representing Time, Actions and Plans’, in F. Anger, H. Guesgen, and J. van Benthem, eds., Proceedings of the Workshop on Spatial and Temporal Reasoning. 13th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Chambéry: IJCAI, pp. 193-217.

An AI approach to reasoning about time, actions, and plans. Following J. F. Allen’s (1984) account, an action is represented by describing what is true while the action is occurring: "An action is defined by means of temporal constraints on the world states, which pertain to the action itself, and on other more elementary actions occurring over time" [p. 193, Abstract].

1994 ‘A Computational Account for a Description Logic of Time and Action’, in J. Doyle, E. Sandewall, and P. Torasso, eds., Principles of Knowledge Representation and Reasoning: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference (KR94), San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 3‑14.

1993 Reference to Abstract Objects in Discourse. A Philosophical Semantics for Natural Language Metaphysics, Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Rich semantic analysis of the patterns of reference to abstract entities (propositions, properties, states of affairs, facts) integrated by an account of the semantics of discourse structure to analyse anaphoric reference. The analysis is pursued "in tandem" with a study of reference to concrete entities such as states and events (E. Bach’s "eventualities"). Indeed it is suggested that there is a spectrum of world immanence, with eventualities and propositions at the two ends, and entities such as facts and states of affairs taking an intermediate position: "like events, [they] have causal efficacy but, like propositions, [they] do not take spatio-temporal modification felicitously" [p. 2]. It is also suggested that these entities are closely correlated, as "natural language metaphysics slides easily from ‘semi-concrete’ eventualities to abstract entities" [p. 214]. Other topics include identity and individuation, the typology of eventualities, event negation, and much more.

On the differences between situation semantics (Barwise 1981, Barwise and Perry 1981b, 1983) and event-based semantics (Higginbotham 1983) for naked infinitives. It is argued that the latter "neither accounts for the relevant usages nor succeeds, on its own terms, in presenting coherent semantics for N[aked] I[nfinitive] perception verbs" [p. 57]. A version of the situation-based theory is presented and defended.

1985b ‘How Extensional is Extensional Perception?’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 8, 203-28.

Argues that naked infinitive perception sentences are actually more extensional than Barwise and Perry’s (1981b, 1983) situation semantics allows.

1995 ‘A Typology and Discourse Semantics for Motion Verbs and Spatial PPs in French’, Journal of Semantics, 12, 163-209.

A semantic analysis of motion describing expressions based on an ontology of "eventualities" and spatio-temporal extensions.

1969 ‘The Accordion Effect Thesis’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 19, 337-42.

1986 ‘Acting for Reasons’, The Philosophical Review, 95, 511-46; reprinted as Chapter 6 of Audi (1993a), pp. 145-78.

Presents a theory of action for a reason (a discriminative response to, and not merely an effect of, a reason). Includes a comparison between fine-grained (unifying) and coarse-grained (multiplying) approaches to events; the account of acting for reasons is presented as neutral between the two approaches.

Chapter 6 [pp. 126-41] on how practical reasoning figures in the dynamics of action: "As a process constituted by a pattern of events, it [practical reasoning] is a candidate to account for the dynamics of actions based on it, above all for what causes them, and for how, in relation to causative events, they come about" [p. 127].

A collection of essays (including a reprint of Audi 1986) where action is viewed as "behavior that is intentional under some description". Includes a general introductory overview [pp. 1-32] where it is stated that "the principal contributions of the book can accommodate either the fine-grained or the coarse-grained ontology (or various intermediate views, such as the component approach)" [p. 3].

1993b ‘Mental Causation: Sustaining and Dynamic’, in J. Heil and A. R. Mele, eds. (1993), pp. 53-74.

After a critical assessment of various sources of doubt about the causal power of the mental, offers a positive account according to which (i) intentional dispositions such as reason states play the role of "sustaining" causation, whereas (ii) mental events play the role of "dynamic" causation, which is "a productive or at least eliciting relation between causative events and other events, those constituting their effects" [p. 74].

1979 ‘Agent Causality: A Model’, Tulane Studies in Philosophy, 28 [Issue on "Studies in Action Theory", ed. by R. C. Whittemore], 71-79.

"Agent causality is not somehow in competition with event causality. A person causes an event when certain events, related to this person i[n] certain ways, cause these events" [p. 79].

1976 ‘Relational Becoming’, Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, 2/2, 12-23.

1987 ‘Point-Eventism’, Reports on Philosophy, 11, 49-55; reprinted as ‘Appendix: Point-Eventism’ in Z. Augustynek, Time. Past, Present, Future (translated from the Polish by S. Semczuk and W. Strawinski), Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers; Warszawa: Polish Scientific Publishers, 1991, pp. 120-27.

Outlines a formal ontological theory proclaiming that every empirical object is either an event or a set-theoretic construction thereof. Events are thought of as non-extended spatio-temporal particulars.

Compares alternative monistic ontologies, based on events and points, respectively.

1993b ‘Point Eventism. An Outline of a Certain Ontology’, in Z. Augustynek and J. J. Jadacki, Possible Ontologies [Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, 29], Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi, pp. 15-100.

1971 ‘Comments’, in R. Binkley, R. Bronaugh, and A. Marras, eds. (1971), pp. 69-75.

"Although we must acknowledge that [people and things] change or act in various ways, we do not also have to acknowledge the existence of things called ‘changes’ or ‘actions’. We may, of course, speak of changes or actions both in our technical and in our everyday discourse; but our speech in this regard should be viewed as a mere manner of speaking. Singular terms purporting to refer to events and actions [...] can in principle be eliminated from our discourse: though perhaps highly convenient to use, they are not actually needed to describe what is or exists" [p. 26].

An introduction to basic distinctions such as that between continuants and processes. Holds that "the ordinary view of the world can be understood as a thing or substance ontology in which events have only a derivative reality" [p. 133]. Favors a predicate modifier approach to adverbial modification.

On the grounds for the ontological commitments of a theory of human action, defending an "agent" theory. Includes a discussion of event identity criteria.

1950 ‘Truth’ (Symposium with P. F. Strawson), Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 24, 111-28; reprinted in Austin (1961b), pp. 85-101 (enlarged edition 1970, pp. 117-33).

Argues that a statement is true when it corresponds to the facts, implying that facts are in the world. Criticisms in Strawson (1950), Shorter (1962), and Vendler (1967a); discussion in Tillman (1966) and Chisholm (1979c).

1956/7 ‘A Plea for Excuses’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 57, 1-30; reprinted in Austin (1961b), pp. 123-52 (enlarged edition 1970, pp. 175-204). Also in D. A. Gustafson, ed., Essays in Philosophical Psychology, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1964, pp. 1-29; in R. A. Ammerman, ed., Classics of Analytic Philosophy, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1965, pp. 379-98; in M. Weitz, ed., Twentieth-Century Philosophy: The Analytic Tradition, New York: The Free Press, 1966, pp. 329-51; in A. R. White, ed. (1968), pp. 19-42; and in C. Lyas, ed., Philosophy and Linguistics, London: Macmillan, 1971, pp. 79-101.

"It is in principle always open to us, along various lines, to describe or refer to "what I did" in so many ways [...] How far, that is, are the motives, intentions and conventions to be part of the description of actions? [...] what is an or one or the action? For we can generally split up what might be named as one action in several distinct ways, into different stretches or phases or stages" [1961, pp. 148-49].

1961a ‘Unfair To Facts’, in Austin (1961b), pp. 102-22 (enlarged edition 1970, pp. 154-74).

Analysis of the locution "The fact that...". Suggests that "The collapse of the Germans is an event and is a fact". Criticisms in Vendler (1967a).

1961b Philosophical Papers (J. O. Urmson and G. J. Warnock, eds.), Oxford: Clarendon Press (enlarged edition London: Oxford University Press, 1970).

1962 How to Do Things with Words (J. O. Urmson, ed.), Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press (second revised edition, 1975, M. Sbisà and J. O. Urmson eds.).

On the description of actions: "The perlocutionary act always includes some consequences, as when we say ‘By doing x I was doing y’: we do bring in a greater or less stretch of ‘consequences’ always, some of which may be ‘unintentional’. There is no restriction to the minimum physical act at all. That we can import an arbitrarily long stretch of what might also be called the ‘consequences’ of our act into the nomenclature of the act itself is, or should be’ a fundamental commonplace of the theory of our language about all ‘action’ in general. Thus if asked ‘What did he do?’, we may reply either ‘He shot the donkey’ or ‘He fired a gun’ or ‘He pulled the trigger’ or ‘He moved his trigger finger’, and all may be correct" [pp. 107-8].

On how events emerge and what determines their boundaries: "It is usually taken for granted that one knows what an event is or how events are demarcated. In this paper an explanation is offered for the emergence of events, the cut hypothesis, which states: ‘A sub-sequence of stimuli is cut out of a sequence to become a cognitive entity if it has been experienced many times in different contexts’, and three experiments to demonstrate the predictive power of the hypothesis are described" [p. 239, Abstract].

1980 ‘Tenses and Aspects as Functions on Verb-Phrases’, in C. Rohrer, ed. (1980), pp. 19-37.

Includes an discussion of the progressive originating with the question: What kinds of expressions are to be classified as having to do with states, processes, accomplishments, and achievements?

1981 ‘On Time, Tense and Aspect: An Essay in English Metaphysics’, in P. Cole, ed., Radical Pragmatics, New York: Academic Press, pp. 63-81.

An attempt to "dig out" the hidden metaphysical assumptions that are essential to an understanding of English tenses and aspects. Analyses time on the basis of Vendler’s (1957) fourfold classification of verb types into states, processes, accomplishments (or "protracted" events) and achievements ("instantaneous" events), collectively referred to as "eventualities". Analyses the latter both ontologically (using mereological notions) and from the perspective of linguistic theory.

1986a ‘The Algebra of Events’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 9 [Special Issue on "Tense and Aspect in Discourse", D. R. Dowty, ed.], 5-16; reprinted in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 497-508.

An extension of Link’s (1983) account of the count-mass-plural domain to the domain of "eventualities", yielding a characterization of the structure of semantic models whose (sorted) domains include events and processes. Based on the proportion events: processes = things: stuff, the proposal is made that events are analogous to singular and plural individuals, while bounded processes (bits of process) are analogous to the portions of matter that make up the ‘material extension’ of those individuals [p. 8].

1986b ‘Natural Language Metaphysics’, in R. Barcan-Marcus, G. J. W. Dorn, and P. Weingartner, eds., Logic, Methodology, and Philosophy of Science VII, Amsterdam: North Holland, pp. 573-95.

Any "serious account of the semantics of natural language" leads to metaphysical questions such as "What do people talk as if there is?" and "What kinds of things and relations among them does one need in order to exhibit the structure of meanings that natural languages seem to have?" [p. 573]. Section 2 ("Eventology") argues that (i) "something like events" must be included in the domains of the model structures used for doing formal semantics, and (ii) one should provide a classification of these entities if one wants to do natural language semantics. "I don’t claim that it is impossible to construct them out of things otherwise needed, just that all the attempts to do so that I know about don’t seem to work" [p. 586].

1978 ‘A Representational Theory of Action’, Philosophical Studies, 34, 361-79.

Outlines a theory ("Representational Causalism") which seeks to do justice to the execution of action, intentional or not, by positing "executive representations for the duration of the action as the requisite psychological cause".

1980 ‘Actions Are Not Events’, Mind, 89, 114-20; reprinted in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 343-49.

Actions are not events. Rather, they are instances of a relation (bringing-about) between an agent and an event, as in von Wright (1963) and Chisholm (1964). Consequences: "We are not obliged to produce a theory of individuation of actions. Instances are not individuals and are not subject to quantification" [p. 119]. Moreover, "Since actions are not events, they do not enter straightforwardly into causal relations--they are neither causes nor effects. This is perfectly consistent with the Causal Theory of action, which does not say that actions are caused but only that an action is performed if a change is caused (in the right way) by a mental episode of the right sort" [p. 120].

1994 Tense, Aspect and Action. Empirical and Theoretical Contributions to Language Typology, Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.

1995 Universals and Property Instances. The Alphabet of Being, Oxford: Blackwell.

1971 ‘A Multiple-Aspect Theory of Time’, Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 2, 163-71.

Every change--every becoming different--is an event, and some events completely include several others.

Argues that "in the narration and description of events and actions we do not employ exactly the same categories [...] Nevertheless, the theory here defended maintains that all kinds of action, including intentional ones, admit of causal or deterministic explanation" [p. 183].

Contra Chisholm, argues that the proper objects of intention are acts, not states of affairs.

1971 ‘The Search for Basic Actions’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 8, 161-70.

Argues that there is no independently identifiable class of actions which may be said to be basic (in some interesting sense) with regard to other actions. Hence the very concept of a basic action is "of dubious value".

Rejects the view that bodily movements are basic actions in favor of a conception of basic actions as "exercises of competences" analysed as "moves" (not "movements").

1984 Language, Sense and Nonsense. A Critical Investigation into Modern Theories of Language, Oxford: Basil Blackwell.

On Davidson’s (1967a) analysis of action sentences: "Why should the legitimacy of an inference a five-year-old has mastered turn on the intricacies of a novel extension of the predicate calculus? And if there are languages which lack devices for nominalizing verbs, is the inference not valid? Or are the ‘grounds’ of its validity beyond the comprehension of speakers of that language?" [p. 246].

1993 ‘Metaphysics and Mental Causation’, in J. Heil and A. R. Mele, eds. (1993), pp. 75-95.

An attempt to dissolve the problem of mental causation by rooting out and motivating rejection of one of the metaphysical assumptions that lead to it, namely the thesis of the "causal closure of the physical" (= the thesis that "every instantiation of a micro-physical property that has a cause at t has a complete micro-physical cause at t" [p. 79]).

1982 ‘Propositions, Facts, and Events’, in W. Leinfellner, E. Kraemer, and J. Schank, eds., Language and Ontology. Proceedings of the 6th International Wittgenstein Symposium, Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, pp. 125-29.

Includes an account of propositions in which facts are truth-value-donors, the analysis focusing on the connection between facts and events "properly construed".

1972 Adverbial semantik. Die Konstitution logisch-semantischer Repräsentationen von Adverbialkonstruktionen [‘Adverbial Semantics. The Constitution of Logical-semantic Representations of Adverbial Constructions’, in German], Frankfurt: Athenäum; Eng. trans. published as The Grammar of Adverbials. A Study in the Semantics and Syntax of Adverbial Constructions, Amsterdam: North Holland, 1976.

An investigation into the logical structure of adverbial constructions, aiming at making inference properties that do not rely on lexical-semantic analysis formally explicit in the logical syntax. The proposed account is a modification of Davidson’s (1967a) event-based representation: a verb-nominalization is predicated about processes as well as about the individuals involved (agent, direct object, etc.). Compare T. Parsons (1980, 1985), Carlson (1984) and Dowty (1989) for related material.

1981 ‘Semantics and Syntax of Nominalizations’, in J. Groenendijk, T. Janssen, and M. Stokhof, eds., Formal Methods in the Study of Language, Amsterdam: CWI, Centrum dor Mathematics and Computer Science, pp. 1-28.

1983 ‘Over de semantiek von nominalisaties’ [On the Semantics of Nominalizations’, in Dutch], Glot, 6, 1-29; revised English edition published as ‘On Aspectual Properties of Dutch and German Nominalizations’, in V. Lo Cascio and C. Vet, eds., Temporal Structure in Sentence and Discourse, Dordrecht: Foris, pp. 7-39.

Objections to Kamp (1979) based on data from Dutch and German. Includes a topology-based classification of three main groups of verb phrases: process (interior of time interval), process with completion/result (interval with defined boundary), and completion/result (boundary of interval).

1988/9 ‘Tenses and Aspects in Discourse’, Theoretical Linguistics, 15, 135-94; incorporated in Chapter 2 of Bartsch (1995), pp. 127-210.

Gives a formal treatment of tense and aspect in German, using individuals and space-time regions as basic entities of the semantic models; situations (events, states, and properties) are construed as intensional entities represented as functions from possible worlds to regions.

1992 ‘Scopes of Tenses and Aspects in a Flexible Categorial Grammar’, Theoretical Linguistics, 18, 1-44; incorporated in Chapter 3 of Bartsch (1995), pp. 211-64.

Developments of the approach set out in (1988/9) within the framework of a "compositional" discourse representation theory.

1995 Situations, Tense, and Aspect. Dynamic Discourse Ontology and the Semantic Flexibility of the Temporal System in German and English, Berlin and New York: de Gruyter.

The first part of the book is devoted to an examination of some basic ontological issues in semantics. "We do not develop a situation semantics [...] Rather, we treat basic situations as entities within semantics. Over these entities, like over individuals, we can quantify and we can refer to them in predicating about them" [p. 6]. See especially § 1.1, where basic situations (events, states, and properties) are construed as intensional, functional entities in the spirit of (1988/9). Includes also a discussion of identity criteria, and of alternative ontologies (e.g., a Quinean ontology with only situations as basic entities: § 8.2). The second part of the book contains applications to the semantics of tense and aspect.

1981 ‘Scenes and Other Situations’, The Journal of Philosophy, 77, 369-97.

Argues that traditional model-theoretic semantics is incapable of accounting for the semantics of perceptual reports of the "naked infinitive" sort, and formulates an alternative situation-based account. (Further developed in Barwise and Perry 1981b, 1983). Compare Higginbotham (1983) and Vlach (1983) for replies in the spirit of Davidson’s (1967a) theory of action sentences.

1981a ‘Semantic Innocence and Uncompromising Situations’, in P. A. French, T. Uehling, and H. K. Wettstein, eds., Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. VI), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 387-403; reprinted in A. P. Martinich, ed., The Philosophy of Language, Third Edition, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 369-81.

A preliminary sketch of situation semantics. Includes a defense against the "slingshot" argument (term introduced here for the first time, in view of the simplicity and minimum of accessories employed by the argument) and a brief outline of the semantics of perceptual reports presented in Barwise (1981).

1983 Situations and Attitudes, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press / Bradford Books.

Full-fledged formulation of situation semantics. Events are treated as dynamic situations (as opposed to states of affairs). The proposed account is germane to that of Kim (1966, 1969, 1973a) and Goldman (1970): events (called "courses of events") are essentially sets of partial functions from spatio-temporal locations to "situation-types" defined by a tuple of objects standing or failing to stand in a certain relation. On the identity issue: "We can say that there is one actual event e, and that its factual parts e1, e2 and e3 correspond to its being several different types of events at once [...] But we could equally well say that all the events are actual and fit together in various ways into larger events. Depending on how we view the matter, we will see the situation structure that represents the world as having fewer or more actual events, but the same factual events" [pp. 67-68].

1986 Story, Performance, Event: Contextual Studies of Oral Narrative, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Events are "action structures, organized by relationships of causality, temporality, and other such linkages; narratives are verbal structures, organized by rules of discourse. Most commonly narratives are seen as "verbal icons of the events they represent, and the problem is one of determining the nature and extent of the isomorphism between them and the means by which this formal relationship is narratively achieved" [p. 5].

1986 ‘The Role of Event Expressions in Grammar’, Studies in Language, 10, 1-52.

There is a common core, shared by how-sentences and bare infinitives following perception verbs, that lies "in the fact that it must be event-expressions that are in the scope of the operator HOW or in the complement of a (non-epistemic) perception verb like see, hear, etc." [p. 5]. The event analysis is used to derive "a unified treatment of manner adverbs and predicative adjectives. The result of this [is] that the categorial distinction between some adverbs and adjectives becomes superfluous" [p. 5].

Includes a fact-based analysis of sentences such as ‘Mary is making pies’ which resembles Davidson’s (1967a) event-based analysis of action sentences. See Clark (1975).

1975 ‘Actions and Events: The Problem of Individuation’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 12, 263-76.

"For the events e and f to be identical, they must have same subject and spatio-temporal location, and their (participial) property descriptions must belong to the same ‘modification set’ (e.g. reddening, reddening slowly, reddening in July). The same criterion applies to actions, which are here treated strictly as a proper subclass of events (John’s closing the door = the door’s becoming closed). Actions related by Goldman’s ‘causal generation’ are therefore distinct, but those related by this and other three types of act-generation are not. This conclusion requires abandonment of the view--questionable on other grounds--that causal context are thoroughly extensional" [The Philosopher’s Index Abstract].

Includes reprints of Davidson (1967c), Gasking (1955), Humber and Madden (1971), and Pap (1957).

1974 ‘Singular Causal Statements: A Reconsideration’, Philosophical Forum, 5, 611-18.

1981 Hume and the Problem of Causation, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Chapter 7 on "Events, Facts, and the Extensionality of Causal Concepts" covers a number of modern accounts of causation and of its ontology (particular attention is devoted to the "slingshot" argument) and relates them to Hume’s philosophy. "The Humean will insist that the Titanic’s sinking and its sinking rapidly are two distinct spatiotemporally restricted particulars. The former is an event. The latter may not be so classified by ordinary thought, but it is surely as much a concrete particular item with its own causes and effects as the former [...] What is crucial for the Humean is that the resulting multiplication of events makes possible a coherent and defensible ontology, a commitment to the extensionality of causal sentences, and an analysis of events that complements the regularity theory" [pp. 274-75].

1977 ‘Handeln und Handlungserklärung’ [‘Acting and Action Explanation’, in German], in A. Beckermann, ed. (1977), pp. 7-84.

1977 Analytische Handlungstheorie. Band 2: Handlungserklärungen [Analytical Action Theory. Volume 2: Action Explanations, in German], Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag.

An anthology of classic papers on action theory (in German translation), focusing on the topic of action explanation. See Meggle, ed. (1977) for volume 1 (on action description).

1981 Temporal Indexicals and the B-Theory of Time, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Pittsburgh.

1988 ‘Temporal Indexicals and the Passage of Time’, Philosophical Quarterly, 38, 158-64; reprinted in L. N. Oaklander and Q. Smith, eds. (1994), pp. 87-93.

Puts forward a "co-reporting theory of tenseless and tensed sentences", whence it is argued that "an event’s having an A-determination--its being past, present, or future--is identical with that event’s bearing a temporal relation to some moment of time. Criticism in Smith (1990a).

1991 ‘A Model of Events and Processes’, in Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-91), Vol. 1, Sydney: IJCAI [Morgan Kaufmann], pp. 506-11.

A model for reasoning about arbitrarily complex dynamic domains involving multiple agents.

1965 ‘Action, Reason, and Purpose’, The Journal of Philosophy, 62, 85-95; reprinted in N. Care and C. Landesman, eds. (1968), pp. 238-52.

On the question: How do intention and reason modify agency to yield the basic idea of action?

1966 ‘Whatever the Consequences’, Analysis, 26, 83-102; reprinted in B. Steinbock and A. Norcross, eds., Killing and Letting Die (second edition), New York: Fordham University Press, 1994, pp. 167-91.

1973 ‘Shooting, Killing, and Dying’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 2, 315-23; reprinted in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 319-27.

A unifier’s solution to the time-of-a-killing problem (Goldman 1971, Thomson 1971a), drawing upon an analogy with material objects. If John is stabbed in the morning and dies at night, can the stab be redescribed as a kill? The problem is the same for material objects: can we describe Wagner at his birth as the composer of Tristan? Compare Vollrath (1975), Grimm (1977), Anscombe (1979a) for similar accounts. See also Davidson (1985b, 1987). Critical remarks in Thalberg (1975) and A. R. White (1979/80).

1981 ‘Morality and Consequences’, in M. McMurrin, ed., The Tanner Lectures on Human Values II, Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 45-116.

Lecture 1, on "Killing and Letting Die" [pp. 47-72], is on the contrast between "what happens because a person did do such and such" and "what happens because he did not" [p. 47].

1985 ‘Adverb-Dropping Inferences and the Lemmon Criterion’, in E. LePore and B. P. McLaughlin, eds. (1985), pp. 193-206.

Argues that if Davidson endorses Lemmon’s (1967) criterion for event identity in terms of sameness of spatio-temporal location, "he ought not to account for any adverbs in terms of predications on events; and so he will be committed to relinquishing one of his two main arguments for having an ontology of events" [p. 206].

1987 ‘Event Causation: The Counterfactual Analysis’, in J. Tomberlin, ed., Metaphysics (Philosophical Perspectives, Vol. 1), Atascadero, CA: Ridgeview, pp. 367-86; reprinted in E. Sosa and M. Tooley, eds. (1993), pp. 217-33.

On some complications for D. K. Lewis’s (1973) counterfactual analysis of causation stemming from the "asymmetry fact": in short, the fact that hasteners are causes but delayers are not.

Thorough analysis of the different types of nominal phrases derived from verbs via nominalizations, such as "that John runs", "John’s running", "John’s run". Events are the referent of the latter type. Their metaphysics is accounted for in terms of Kim’s conception of events as property exemplifications (more precisely, events are instances of particular properties--tropes--at particular spatio-temporal zones). Kim’s semantics of event names (and the related identity criteria for events) is however rejected: "The metaphysical thesis that Leibniz’s journey was an instance of property P has not the faintest tendency to imply the semantic thesis that any name of Leibniz’s journey must contain a name of P or a predicate that connotes P" [p. 93]. Arguments in favour of fact causation, every event being associated with an underlying fact. Reviewed by Cresswell (1989), McHenry (1989), Teichmann (1990), Wilkerson (1990), Petit (1991b), McIntyre (1992), Cleland (1994). See also the (1991a) ‘Précis’ and the related symposium.

1991a ‘Précis of Events and Their Names’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 51, 625-28.

Compact exposition of the views and arguments advanced in (1988). See also (1991b).

1991b ‘Reply to Reviewers’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 51, 647-62.

1994 ‘The "Namely" Analysis of the "By"-Locution’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 17, 29-51.

Argues that the "by"-locution (in sentences like "He broke a promise by coming home late") states "a relation between two complete propositions about how the person behaves--propositions which usually do not involve the concept of an act [...] The initial clause says that some fact about how the person behaved had relational property RP, and the gerundial phrase says what [...] Thus, ‘He broke a promise - by - coming home late’ analyses into ‘Some fact about his behavior conflicted with a promise he had made earlier--namely the fact that--he came home late’" [p. 36]. Based on the last chapter of (1988).

Includes some new thoughts on the "by"-relation and on event- and act-individuation.

1996 ‘What Events Are’, in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 137-51.

A compact and refined formulation of the views put forward in (1988, 1991a, 1991b, 1994), including a development of Bennett’s criticism of Kim’s "confusion" between metaphysical and semantic issues.

1977 ‘A Guide to the Logic of Tense and Aspect in English’, Logique et Analyse, 20, 491-515.

Puts forward an interval-based analysis of tensed sentences. Developments in (1981).

1981 ‘On Tense and Aspect: One Analysis’, in P. Tedeschi and A. Zaenen, eds. (1981), pp. 13-30.

Develops an interval-based analysis of the progressive-perfect distinction in English according to which (1) a sentence in the progressive form such as "Jones is leaving" is true at some time interval I iff the extension of the subject is in the extension of the verb at some open interval I' including I; (2) a simple non-progressive sentence such as "Jones has left" is true at I iff the extension of the subject is in the extension of the verb at some closed interval I' preceding I. "The present perfect tense always describes a performance; the perfect aspect indicates a completion [...] The present progressive always describes an activity" [p. 14-15].

1978 Toward the Logic of Tense and Aspect in English, Indianapolis: Indiana University Linguistics Club.

A semantic analysis of tense and aspect using intervals of time (as opposed to instants of time, as in standard tense logic of the time).

1974 ‘Elementary Causal Structures in Newtonian and Minkowskian Space-Time’, Theoria, 40, 191-201.

Puts forward a unified treatment of certain aspects of the causal structures of Newtonian and Minkowskian space-time. The account is formulated within first-order classical logic with identity and uses as a single primitive notion a ternary relation of causal betweenness among space-time events.

1955 ‘Professor Quine on Analyticity’, Mind, 64, 254-58; reprinted in Bergmann (1959), pp. 139-43.

"The events signified by proper names of the interpreted [relativity] calculus are happenings among ordinary physical objects persisting in time and space. This is why one does not have to accept a sense data philosophy or any other sort of ‘eventism’ in order to square one’s self with modern science" [p. 142].

1957 ‘Elementarism’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 18, 107-14; reprinted in Bergmann (1959), pp. 115-23.

"‘Event’, to be sure, is vague. In some contexts we call the French Revolution a single event; in some others we don’t. In the present context, though, an event is, without doubt, what is wholly contained in a specious present. A particular is wholly contained in a specious present; a character (universal) is not [...] Events are a kind of states of affairs. A state of affairs is what is referred to (not "named"!) by a sentence. In our context, which "ties" events to a specious present, an event is a state of affairs referred to by a substitution instance of ‘ƒ(x)’, say, ‘gr(a)’ [where ‘gr’ is a first-order predicate such as ‘green’]" [pp. 117-18].

1981 ‘Føllesdal and Davidson on Reasons and Causes: A Preliminary Account’, in W. Rabinowicz (ed.), Tankar och Tankefel: Tillägnade Zalma Puterman (Philosophical Studies of the Philosophical Society and the Department of Philosophy of the University of Uppsala, nr. 33), Uppsala: Uppsala Universitet, pp. 9-21.

Argues that Føllesdal (1980) has not succeeded in refuting Davidson’s (1963) view that the causes of actions are the reasons for acting, though "the truth of the matter may very well contain elements from both sides of the dispute" [p. 9].

1994 Relating Events in Narrative. A Crosslinguistic Developmental Study, Hillsdale, NJ, and Hove, UK: Erlbaum.

An extensive psychological study of the way narrators develop linguistic means to connect events and syntactically "package" them into coherent structures.

On characterizing determinism: All events involve the presence of some change; hence, if determinism is formulated as a thesis about events, it turns into a thesis about changes, which implies that a body at rest presents a difficulty for the determinist. This and related difficulties are avoided by not using the concept of event in the definition of determinism.

1973 ‘The Counterfactual Analysis of Causation’, The Journal of Philosophy, 70, 568-69.

1994 ‘Temporal Reference, Aspect and Actionality: Their Neutralization and Interactions, Mostly Exemplified in Italian’, in C. Bache, H. Basbøll, and C.-E. Lindberg, eds. (1994), pp. 113-37.

An inventory of facts about the semantics of verbs, with a view to a typological systematization.

1995 Temporal Reference, Aspect, and Actionality. Vol. 1: Semantic and Syntactic Perspectives, Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier.

Includes Bonomi (1995), Desclés and Guentchéva (1995), Pustejovsky and Busa (1995) and Verkuyl (1995a) along with many other papers on tense, aspect, and Aktionsarten.

1995 Temporal Reference, Aspect, and Actionality. Vol. 2: Typological Perspectives, Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier.

Sequel to Bertinetto, Bianchi, Higginbotham, Squartini, eds. (1995). Mostly linguistics-oriented contributions.

1989 ‘Event Nominalization: Proposals and Problems’, Linguistische Studien 194, 1-73.

1995 ‘Donald Davidson’, in J. Kim and E. Sosa, eds., A Companion to Metaphysics, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 108-10.

Includes a presentation of the main lines of interaction between semantics and ontology in Davidson’s programme, with particular reference to the analysis of action sentences.

1992 ‘Actions, evénements et forme logique’ [‘Actions, Events, and Logical Form’, in French], Philosophie, 33, 52-71.

1976 ‘The Logic of Action’, in M. Brand and D. Walton, eds. (1976), pp. 87-104.

Suggests to get rid of actions and events by paraphrasing them away (in a language with suitably rich logical resources).

1989 ‘Particular Actions’, in D. Stewart, ed., Entities and Individuation. Studies in Ontology and Language in Honor of Neil Wilson, Lewiston, Lampeter, and Queenston: Edwin Mellen Press, pp. 19-38.

Against ontological commitment to events: "Events [...] are like wrinkles, and are creatures of the superstructure. At the base level we describe events by referring to and characterizing objects, places and times" [p. 21]. Includes several objections to Brand’s (1976a, 1977) criterion for event identity in terms of necessary spatio-temporal coincidence: neither objects nor events are essential occupiers of spatio-temporal regions, and even if they were, the difference introduced by Brand would not properly distinguish among them. Moreover, argues that Brand’s criterion suffers crucially from the difficulty of fixing the spatial boundaries of many events.

Includes Davidson (1971a) and a useful thirty-three page bibliography on the philosophy of action.

Argues that basic intentional action should be understood as consisting of an irreducible relation between an agent and an event (or between an agent and a set of events).

Argues that agent causality cannot be analysed as a species of event causation and is thus best viewed as a conceptual primitive.

1989 Natural Agency. An Essay on the Causal Theory of Action, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

The core of the problem of natural agency: "What makes action problematic from a naturalistic perspective is that actions [...] are understood as essentially involving determination of events by the agent. [...] But from the perspective of natural science, if events are understood as ‘determined’ at all, it is just in the sense that their occurrence is event-caused" [p. 39]. The solution--it is argued--lies in a causal theory of action: actions are events caused by mental states of the right sort.

1958 ‘Making Something Happen’, in S. Hook, ed., Determinism and Freedom in the Age of Modern Science. A Philosophical Symposium, New York: New York University Press, pp. 15-30 (reprint New York: Collier Books, 1961, pp. 31-45).

An analysis of the locution ‘Person P made motion M happen by doing action A’.

1994 ‘Back and Forth Through Time and Events’, in P. Dekker and M. Stokhof, eds., Proceedings of the 9th Amsterdam Colloquium, Amsterdam: Institute for Language, Logic and Computation, pp. 161-73.

"Formal accounts of temporal constructions in natural language often disagree about the semantic ontology to be assumed--should it be point based, interval based, or event based? We think that more adequate analyses of natural language will be obtained by combining ontologies, not choosing between them. We illustrate this by combining interval structures with (various forms of) event structures into what we call back-and-forth structures" [p. 161]. It is then argued that such structures enable one to view temporal constructions (such as tense and aspect) as methods for moving systematically between information sources.

1994 The Oxford Dictionary of Philosophy, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.

The entry ‘Event’ [p. 128] takes the central philosophical question about events to be whether they are individuals or proposition-like entities.

1990a ‘Concerted Instant-Interval Temporal Semantics I: Temporal Ontologies’, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 31, 403-14.

An examination of the relationships between instant-based and interval-based temporal semantics.

1990b ‘Concerted Instant-Interval Temporal Semantics II: Temporal Valuations and Logics of Change’, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 31, 580-601.

Considers some "logics of change" stemming from the mutual definability of instant and interval temporal structures, as examined in (1990a).

1979 ‘Meaning and Contrastive Stress’, The Philosophical Review, 88, 263-98.

A criticism of Dretske (1977) on the effect of contrastive stress on the interpretation of, e.g., causal statements.

1968 ‘Physical Determinism’, in N. Care and C. Landesman, eds. (1968), pp. 127-56.

Includes a discussion of the by-relation and of such questions as: "don’t ‘A moved his finger’ and ‘A’s finger moved’ refer to one and the same event? If so, how could the former possibly explain the occurrence of the latter?" [p. 145].

Argues that "if we take seriously English sentences as referring expressions", Kim’s own defence against the argument that all true sentences pick out the same event is "ill-founded". Kim is anyway defended on different grounds.

A systematic analysis of the semantics of sentences reporting mental events such as desires and perceivings.

1995 ‘Aspect and Quantification’, in P. M. Bertinetto, V. Bianchi, J. Higginbotham, and M. Squartini, eds. (1995), pp. 93-110.

An analysis of when-clauses in Italian, focusing on the interaction between aspect, event reference, and quantificational structure.

1993 ‘Only: Association with Focus in Event Semantics’, Natural Language Semantics, 2, 1-45.

Proposes a semantic analysis of sentences involving ‘only’ (in combination with focused expressions) within the frame of an event semantics à la E. Bach (1986a) and Krifka (1989a).

1982 Whitehead’s Theory of Events, Doctoral Dissertation, Wayne State University.

A detailed reconstruction, including comparisons with the views of Quine, Chisholm, Lemmon, Davidson. Concludes that the merging of the categories of event and object in Whitehead’s later works, and his insistence on internal relations, commit him to the "untenable position" of the essentiality of an entity’s spatio-temporal location.

1985 ‘Event Calculus’, Proceedings of the 9th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-85), Vol. 1, Los Angeles: IJCAI [Morgan Kaufmann], pp. 524-27.

"This paper presents Event Calculus, a model for representing the identifying characteristics of physical events in terms of changes in a scene of time-related combinations of other physical events. The model is used to construct a knowledge-based system for event recognition which forms a high-level description of changes on a scene, given a lower-level description of the input" [Author’s abstract]. Not to be confused with either the "event calculus" of Kowalski and Sergot (1986) or that of Larson and Segal (1995).

Criticizes Davidson’s (1967a) analysis of adverbial contexts as linguistically incorrect and lacking in generality. Outlines an account whereby adverbial modification is treated as an operation on sentences (adverbs being of various kinds--of time, place, manner, etc.). The principles underlying the inferential relations among adverbs are given in axiomatic form.

1996 ‘Abduction to Plausible Causes: An Event-based Model of Belief Update’, Artificial Intelligence, 83, 143-66.

A critical examination of various adequacy conditions put forward in the literature, culminating with the formulation of a core set of conditions that any adequate criterion of event identity should satisfy.

1983 ‘Criteria for Event Identity’, Philosophy Research Archives, 9, 29-78.

Reviews arguments in favor or against various event identity criteria. (The adequacy conditions argued for in (1981) turn out to be insufficient for deciding among such a variety of criteria.)

1980 Action and Responsibility, Bowling Green, OH: Applied Philosophy Program.

1979 ‘Two Logical Connection Arguments and Some Principles about Causal Connection’, Erkenntnis, 14, 1-23.

Denies the principle that causally related events are logically distinct, and objects to its application to the case of mental events and movements.

1967 Some Systematic and Extra-Systematic Considerations Concerning the Description of Human Actions, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Rochester.

Argues that some actions that would intuitively be taken as non-basic (viz., complexes of basic actions) are rated basic by Danto’s (1965) account. Also criticises Danto’s definitions insofar as they imply that a person’s actions cause the person to perform other actions.

On the question: What are the candidates for causes of actions? Examines various options; does not make a case for any particular candidate, but rejects Davidson’s (1963) account that the causes of actions are the reasons for acting.

1970b ‘Introduction. The Logic of Action’, in Brand, ed. (1970), pp. 219-35.

1971 ‘The Language of Not Doing’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 8, 45-53.

An analysis of refraining according to which S refrains from performing a iff (i) it is not the case that S performs a, and (ii) there is some action that S performs, b, such that S performs b in order that S's performing b prevents S's performing a. Criticized by Gorr (1979).

Points out that Goldman’s notion of "generation" yields incomplete diagrams, with infinitely many missing intermediate action descriptions between each term (when properly completed, the diagrams branch indefinitely leftward).

1976a ‘Particulars, Events, and Actions’, in M. Brand and D. Walton, eds. (1976), pp. 133-58.

Events are spatio-temporal particulars, differing from physical objects only in that they do not fully occupy the spatio-temporal region in which they occur. The relevant identity criterion is a modal strengthening of Quine’s and Lemmon’s: events are the same which occur necessarily within the same region. (See Quinton 1979, Hacker 1982b, and Lombard 1986 for the objection that this makes events still too similar to material objects, and Binkley 1989 for objections to the modal distinction between the two.) Semantically, the criterion says that an event-identity statement ‘a=b’ is true iff ‘Necessarily, a+ and b+ occur within the same spatio-temporal region’ is true, where a and b are canonical event descriptions and a+ and b+ the result of applying Kaplan’s Dthat operator to rigidify names and descriptions occurring transparently therein. See Tye (1979), Horgan (1980a), Wierenga and Feldman (1981), Simons (1981), and Tomberlin (1987) for further criticisms to this characterization.

1976b ‘Reply to Martin’, in M. Brand and D. Walton, eds. (1976), pp. 193-96.

1977 ‘Identity Conditions for Events’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 14, 329-37; reprinted in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 363-71.

Davidson’s account (1969a) is found inadequate insofar as it implies that all ineffectual events are identical; Kim’s criterion (1969, 1973a) is found inadequate insofar as it presupposes a way of specifying the range of properties that are constitutive of events, which can only be given by delineating some "conceptually significant property" of events. Brand’s own proposal is a restatement of the one put forward in (1976a): "necessary spatiotemporal coincidence provides adequate identity conditions for events" [p. 329]. (See 1976a for related references.)

What properties must a mental event have in order for it to be the proximate cause of action? Tentative answer: it must involve a conative component, a property of "immediate intending" whose main characteristic is a "pushing effect" (or "moving to act").

1979b ‘On Tye’s "Brand on Event Identity"’, Philosophical Studies, 36, 61-68.

A response to Tye’s (1979) criticisms of the event identity criterion put forward in Brand (1976a, 1977).

1979c ‘Causality’, in P. Asquith and H. Kyburg, Jr., eds., Current Research in Philosophy of Science, East Lansing, MI: Philosophy of Science Association, pp. 252-81.

A review article, focusing mostly on the analysis of singular causal statements.

1980b ‘Philosophical Action Theory and the Foundations of Motivational Psychology’, in M. Bradie and M. Brand, eds. (1980), pp. 1-19.

An attempt to take "a step toward the unifying forces" of the philosophy of action and the psychological theory of motivation and behavior insofar as they focus on the single issue of human action. Includes a restatement of the views put forward in (1979a). Comments in Kim (1980).

1981a ‘A Particularist Theory of Events’, Grazer philosophische Studien, 12/13 [special issue also published as R. Haller, ed., Science and Ethics, Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1981], 187-202.

A revised version of the theory of events advanced in (1976a, 1977): based on Horgan’s (1980) discussion, the semantic formulation of the identity criterion becomes "if a+ and b+ are rigid, then ‘a=b’ is true iff ‘Necessarily, a+ and b+ occur within the same spatio-temporal region’ is true. Includes some remarks on the consequences of the theory for issues concerning mental events.

1982 ‘Physical Objects and Events’, in W. Leinfellner, E. Kraemer, and J. Schank, eds., Language and Ontology. Proceedings of the 6th International Wittgenstein Symposium, Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, pp. 106-16.

Defense of the particularist conception put forward in (1976a, 1981a): "Physical objects occupy spatio-temporal regions, and so do events: they are both types of concrete particulars. But there is a crucial difference between them. Physical objects wholly occupy the spatio-temporal regions in which they exist; but events do not wholly occupy the spatio-temporal regions in which they occur". This is why events appear to be ephemeral, though in fact they are on a par with physical objects. Restatement of the identity criterion defended in (1976a, 1977, 1979b).

1984 Intending and Acting. Toward a Naturalized Action Theory, Cambridge, MA: MIT Press/Bradford Books.

A comprehensive essay on action theory, its ontological foundations, and the folk psychology of intending, desiring and believing. Chapter 3 defends and further articulates the particularist conception of events and the corresponding identity criterion put forward in (1976a, 1977, 1979b, 1981a, 1982).

1986 ‘Intentional Actions and Plans’, in P. A. French, T. Uehling, and H. K. Wettstein, eds., Studies in the Philosophy of Mind (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. X), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 213-30.

Articulates and defends the thesis that intentional action is action performed in following a plan.

1989a ‘Proximate Causation of Action’, in J. Tomberlin, ed. (1989), pp. 423-42.

Argues that a successful causal theory of action requires that there is a single unique type of event that proximately causes action.

1989b ‘Events as Spatio-temporal Particulars: A Defense’, in W. L. Gombocz, H. Rutte, and W. Sauer, eds., Traditionen und Perspektiven der analytischen Philosophie. Festschrift für Rudolf Haller, Vienna, Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, pp. 398-414.

Defends the view put forward in (1976a, 1977, 1979, 1981a, 1982, 1984) against Kim’s view and the counterarguments of Lombard (1986) and Tomberlin (1987). The final section compares that view with that of D. K. Lewis (1986b).

1989c Review of Lombard (1986), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 49, 525-29.

1991 ‘Action’, in H. Burkhardt and B. Smith, eds., Handbook of Metaphysics and Ontology, Vol. 1, Munich: Philosophia, pp. 17-18.

Concise and useful introduction to the main issues and positions in action theory.

Includes Prichard (1949), Davidson (1963), Danto (1965), Rescher (1970), and an extensive annotated bibliography.

Includes reprints of Burks (1951), Gasking (1955), R. Taylor (1963b), J. L. Mackie (1965), and Davidson (1967c) along with an extensive introduction (Brand 1976c) and an annotated bibliography on causation [pp. 369-87].

1976 Action Theory. Proceedings of the Winnipeg Conference on Human Action, Dordrecht: Reidel.

Includes Binkley (1976), Brand (1976a, 1976b), Chisholm (1976b), Goldman (1976), Kim (1976), R. M. Martin (1976), Sellars (1976), and Thalberg (1976).

1991 ‘Some Remarks on the "Slingshot" Argument’, in G. Schurz and G. J. W. Dorn, eds., Advances in Scientific Philosophy. Essays in Honour of Paul Weingartner on the Occasion of the 60th Anniversary of His Birthday [Poznan Studies in the Philosophy of the Sciences and the Humanities, 24], Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi, pp. 421-37.

Proposes to take fact-bundles, rather than individual facts, as truth-makers also for atomic sentences, arguing that this blocks the application of the "slingshot" argument against an ontology of facts. Includes a review of the literature on the argument.

1989 The Mind of Donald Davidson [=Grazer philosophische Studien, 36], Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi.

1963 ‘Wants as Explanations of Actions’, The Journal of Philosophy, 60, 425-35; reprinted in N. Care and C. Landesman, eds. (1968), pp. 199-213.

1967 ‘The Logic of the Identity Theory’, The Journal of Philosophy, 64, 515-37.

An attempt to provide "a formulation of the identity theory which we think everyone can at least understand, which affirms that phenomenal events like being-looked-red-to and itching are retained as ultimate items in the furniture of the world, and which construes ‘identity’ in a way sufficiently strong to remove the traditional philosophical puzzles" [p. 515].

Argues that the fine-grained approach to action identity of Kim and Goldman cannot account for certain relations intuitively holding between the various events involved in cases such as x’s raising his nose by raising his hand (thereby becoming a person with an uptilted nose).

1985 ‘Davidson’s Theory of Intention’, in B. Vermazen and M. B. Hintikka, eds. (1985), pp. 13-26; reprinted with an added Appendix in E. LePore and B. P. McLaughlin, eds. (1985), pp. 14-28.

Difficulties for Davidson’s theory of intention "are rooted in an overly limited conception of intentions and plans in practical reasoning" [p. 13].

1987 Intention, Plans, and Practical Reason. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press.

Argues that intentions are neither desires nor beliefs but plans (or pieces of partial plans) for actions.

A tense-logic reformulation of Chisholm’s (1970) formal reduction of talk about event occurrences to talk about recurrable events.

The ‘event’ concept "always has a temporal connotation and implies a ‘happening’ of some sort. We are not likely to speak of a book passively resting on a table as an ‘event’" [p. 115].

Section 2 on Strawson’s (1959) views on the asymmetric relation of dependency between events and objects. Section 3.3.b criticizes both Davidson’s (1969a) and Kim’s (1969) identity criteria for actions and events as failing to provide a sufficient condition. (Most author criticize Kim with regard to the sufficiency condition, as being excessively fine-grained.) Concludes that "it is best [...] simply to adopt our general theory of identity and apply it to the identity of events" [p. 70].

1962 ‘What Are Effects?’, in R. J. Butler, ed., Analytical Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 15-20.

An account of the concept of action "from the point of view of the agent", based on "the primacy of inanimate action" and "the pervasiveness of explanatory insight in the description of action".

1960 Time, Tense, and the Verb. A Study in Theoretical and Applied Linguistics, with Particular Attention to Spanish, Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press.

Foresees twelve distinct tense forms "representing all possible order relations between all possible events and four axes of orientation". (See diagram on p. 31 for the nine tenses exemplified in English.) Gives "seven basic axioms which are descriptive of the objective nature of events: (1) All events take place in time. (2) All events take time to take place; they have length and are measurable. (3) All events--with, perhaps, some theoretical or irrelevant exceptions--have a beginning (initiative aspect), a middle (imperfective aspect), and an end (terminative aspect). (4) All events take place unidirectionally; the end is always later in time than the beginning. (5) No event can be identical with itself. (6) All repetitions of the same event are sequent and serial. (7) All events are either cyclic or noncyclic, that is, desinent or indesinent in grammatical terminology" [pp. 16-17].

1977a ‘States and Events’, in W. E. Hartnett, ed., Systems: Approaches, Theories, Applications, Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel, pp. 71-95.

Claims that "the concepts of state and event are employed not only in ontology but also in epistemology [...], but uncritically since they are not analyzed" [p. 72]. On the proposed analysis, "Every event occurs in or to some concrete thing, and it consists in a change of state of the thing" [p. 89]. Events that can be analyzed into further events "may be also called processes [...] Being changes of states of things, events and processes are representable as trajectories in the state spaces of changing things. And because states are relative to the reference frame and the representation [...], their changes too are relative in the same sense" [ibid.].

1977b Ontology I: The Furniture of the World, Volume 3 of Treatise on Basic Philosophy, Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel.

Chapter 5, "Change", expounds the view that every event consists in a (quantitative or qualitative) change of state of some thing: "science [...] provides no ground for hypothesising the existence of thingless events any more than it suggests that there might be changeless things" [p. 273]. A systematic formalization of this view is provided.

1979 ‘Individualism and the Mental’, in P. A. French, T. Uehling, and H. K. Wettstein, eds. (1979), pp. 73-121

Contains an argument against the token-identity of the mental and the physical [pp. 109-113].

1993 ‘Mind-Body Causation and Explanatory Practice’, in J. Heil and A. R. Mele, eds. (1993), pp. 97-120.

Includes a discussion of Davidson’s (1986) reactions to the argument against token-identity put forward in Burge (1979).

1984 ‘Basic Tense Logic’, in D. Gabbay and F. Guenthner, eds., Handbook of Philosophical Logic, Volume II (Extensions of Classical Logic), Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 89-133.

1951 ‘The Logic of Causal Propositions’, Mind, 60, 263-82; reprinted in M. Brand, ed. (1976), pp. 257-76.

Develops a language for expressing causal propositions: it makes use of a connective of causal implication and is eventually extended with modal operators of causal possibility and causal necessity. Compare Føllesdal (1965, 1966) for problems (in the spirit of Davidson’s 1967c "slingshot") and developments.

1975 Cause, Chance, Reason: An Inquiry into the Nature of Scientific Evidence, Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Chapters 6 and 7 include developments and applications of the logic of causal propositions introduced in (1951).

1986 ‘States of Affairs’, in R. J. Bogdan, ed., Roderick M. Chisholm, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 113-33.

Raises various questions about the nature of the category of states of affairs in Chisholm’s ontology, and argues that the concept of a state of affairs is itself obscure.

1969 ‘On Events and Event-Descriptions’, in J. Margolis, ed. (1969), pp. 84-94.

Symposium with D. Davidson (1969b) and R. M. Martin (1969b). Argues, against Martin, that "the sharp contrasts he draws between facts and events fail to catch all-important nuances of talk about both [...] Sometimes one just cannot say whether [a given phrase] describes an event or names a fact" [pp. 86, 88].

1984 ‘Relationism and Possible Worlds’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 35, 101-13.

On the possibility of rewriting physical theories by referring only to material objects and events (as opposed to space-time points). Focuses on modal arguments.

Two ways of revising a tense logic à la Kripke by adding predicate modifiers so as to give close-to-the-surface analyses of sentences involving temporal qualifications.

1991 ‘Event Structure versus Discourse Coherence’, in M. Caenepeel, J. Delin, E. Oversteegen, and J. Sanders, eds., Proceedings of the dandi Workshop on Discourse Coherence, Edinburgh: University of Edinburgh.

On how the text type (e.g., narrative vs. non-narrative) affects the temporal ordering and the functioning of aspectual constructions in discourse. Focuses on simple past event sequences.

Further explorations of the ideas put forward in (1991), but with reference to past perfect constructions.

1994 ‘Temporal Structure and Discourse Structure’, in C. Vet and C. Vetters, eds. (1994), pp. 5-20.

Argues that knowledge about relationships between events is not enough to explain when simple-past reverse-order discourses are acceptable; knowledge about discourse structure is also important.

1981 ‘The Metaphysic of Abstract Particulars’, in P. A. French, T. Uehling, and H. K. Wettstein, eds., Foundations of Analytic Philosophy (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. VI), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 477-88.

Events "are widely acknowledged to be particulars. They are plainly not ordinary concrete particulars. They are, in my opinion, best viewed as trope-sequences, in which one condition gives way to others. Events, on this view, are changes in which tropes replace one another" [p. 480].

Very rich analysis of tropes, including some applications to events: "On the trope scheme, events fit in without difficulty. Since the tropes are themselves particulars, a succession of tropes at a place will be itself a particular occasion. And since tropes have natures, trope succession will involve that transformation of quality or relation which every event consists in" [p. 22].

1991 ‘Causation, Supervenience, and Method. Reflections on Jonathan Bennett’s Events and Their Names’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 51, 637-40.

Part of a symposium on J. Bennett (1988) (with replies in J. Bennett 1991b). Assuming that Bennett believes facts to be tropes of a kind (which Bennett denies in his reply), objects that "the distinction between facts and their ‘corresponding’ events is a language-dependent distinction. In a world without thought, without different ways of conceptualizing the same situation, there is no way to distinguish a given swim from the journey that it is. Bennett’s claim that these must be distinct because they differ in causal power rests on intensional examples--that Peter swam surprised us, for instance, while that he journeyed did not" [p. 638].

1984 ‘Inner and Outer Basic Action’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 84, 83-102.

An account of basic actions is proposed and argued to solve problems arising in other theories, especially with respect to the "internalizing" of actions.

On whether cases of unexpected paralysis imply that bodily actions beginning inside the body with brain events of trying also end inside the body.

1993 Formal Semantics. An Introduction, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Chapter 8 ("Time, Tense and Aspect") includes a brief exposition of Vendler’s classification of events and Aktionsarten.

Includes Bogen (1968) and reprints of D. Bennett (1965), Brandt and Kim (1963), Danto (1963, 1965), Davidson (1963), Melden (1956), Silber (1963/4).

1970 ‘Davidson’s Notion of Logical Form’, Inquiry, 13 [Special Issue on "Action"], 129-39.

Criticisms of the notion of logical form underlying Davidson’s account of action sentences in (1967a). Among other things, it is argued that "($x)(Kicked (Shem, Shaun, x))" is not the logical form of "Shem kicked Shaun" but (at most) a logically equivalent sentence. Davidson’s reply in (1970c).

1984 ‘Thematic Roles and their Role in Semantic Interpretation’, Linguistics, 22, 259-79.

Puts forward a theory of semantic roles as relations between individuals and events. The account is similar to those of T. Parsons (1980) and of Dowty (1989).

1987 Metaphysics: An Introduction, Houndmills and London: Macmillan Education.

Events and processes are particulars that involve changes in other particulars [pp. 51-52].

1980 ‘What Place Has the Notion of a Basic Action in the Theory of Action?’, Ratio, 22, 39-51.

Against Danto (1965), argues that it is a mistake to suppose that reasoning about actions begins with "basic actions". The relations between basic and non-basic actions are of an inferential rather than a causal kind.

1981a ‘Event Identity and a Significant Physicalism’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 19, 171-80.

Argues that Davidson’s (1969a) identity criterion for events in terms of sameness of causes and effects applies to physical (law-governed) events, not just events simpliciter. As a consequence, the thesis of anomalous monism becomes: "every mental event has a physical description that occurs in a law statement concerning that event".

1979 ‘On Transworld Event Identity’, The Philosophical Review, 88, 443-52.

On the condition for transworld event identity adopted by van Inwagen (1978a). Among other things, the following theses are negatively assessed: (a) For any event particular e, if one of the parts of e occurs at time t, then it is an essential feature of e that this part occurs at t [p. 445]; (b) For any event particular e, if e' causes e, then the property of having e' as a cause is essential to e [p. 448].

1989a ‘Can Substantial Changes Be Qualitative Changes?’, Analysis, 49, 33-35.

Sees no reason for rejecting the possibility that some events qualify as qualitative changes (events whose subjects change qualitatively) as well as substantial changes (events whose subjects either begin or cease to exist).

An examination of the essentialist principle, defended e.g. by Lombard (1986), that the minimal subjects of an event are essential to the event. Subscription to this principle "may require non-cosmetic revisions of orthodox modal intuitions bearing upon commonplace things" [p. 217].

1992 Gli Eventi [Events, in Italian], Doctoral Dissertation, University of Milan.

Against J. Bennett (1988) argues that properties are the referent of gerundive nominals. Draws a distinction between states and events on the one hand, and static and dynamic states on the other hand.

1995 ‘Temporal Entities in Space’, in P. Amsili, M. Borillo, and L. Vieu, eds. (1995), Part D, pp. 66-78.

On the spatial structure of events and processes. Hypothesises that some spatial and temporal concepts are not completely domain-specific (complementarity hypothesis; see Mayo 1961). Includes a discussion of event motion and object rotation.

1994 La philosophie du son [Philosophy of Sound, in French], Nîmes: Chambon.

Argues that events are the primary auditory objects--located at the resonating body--and that some of these are sounds. Includes a discussion of the logical form of auditory reports in a Davidsonian framework.

1994 Holes and Other Superficialities, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press/ Bradford Books.

1996a ‘Introduction’, in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. xi-xxxviii.

1996b ‘The Structure of Spatial Localization’, Philosophical Studies, 82, 205-39.

Discusses the thesis that events are among those entities that do not occupy the spatial region at which they are located.

1996 Events, Aldershot: Dartmouth Publishing (International Research Library of Philosophy, 15).

Includes J. Bennett (1996) along with unabridged reprints of Anscombe (1979a), E. Bach (1986a), K. Bach (1980), J. Bennett (1973), Brand (1977), Chisholm (1970), Cleland (1991), Cresswell (1986), Cutting (1981), Davidson (1967a, 1967c, 1969a, 1970a), L. H. Davis (1970), Dretske (1967), Gill (1993), Goldman (1971), Hacker (1982a, 1982b), Higginbotham (1983), Horgan (1978), Kim (1973a, 1976), D. K. Lewis (1986b), Lombard (1979a), Mourelatos (1978), T. Parsons (1989), Peterson (1989), Quine (1985), Thomson (1971a).

1960 ‘Outline of a Theory on the General Logical Structure of the Language of Action’, Theoria, 26, 151-82.

1965 ‘The Logic of Change, Action and Norms’, The Journal of Philosophy, 62, 333-44.

A critical examination of von Wright (1963), with some clarifications and developments.

1967 ‘Comments on D. Davidson’s "The Logical Form of Action Sentences"’, in Rescher, ed. (1967), pp. 104-12.

Accepts Davidson’s (1967a) analysis of action sentences but suggests to revise it (i) by further separating out the event participants, and (ii) by treating prepositions linking verbs to nominal expressions as forming one predicate together with the verb. Thus, a sentence such as "I flew my spaceship to the Morning Star" is analysed as having the logical form "($e)(Flew(I,e) & Flew(e,my spaceship) & Flying-to(e,the Morning Star))". Both suggestions are rejected by Davidson in his (1967b) reply. (ii) is admittedly a minor point, but the idea in (i) has later been taken seriously by various authors. See T. Parsons (1980, 1985, 1989, 1990), Carlson (1984), and Dowty (1989) inter alia.

1979 ‘Intensionality and Identity in Human Action and Philosophical Method’, Noûs, 13, 235-60.

Critical review of the 1977 reissue of Goldman (1970). Suggests that the unifier-multiplier controversy is a non-issue.

1980 ‘Conventional Aspects of Human Action, Its Time, Its Place’, Dialogue, 19, 436-60.

"(i) What are the conventions involved in timing and locating actions? (ii) What is the rationale for those conventions? (iii) Is that rationale sufficient to show the usefulness of those conventions? (iv) Can and should those conventions be improved upon?" [p. 436].

1985 ‘Aspectual Actions and Davidson’s Theory of Events’, in E. LePore and B. P. McLaughlin, eds. (1985), pp. 294-328.

Advocates aspects of events to solve deontic paradoxes (such as Forrester’s (1984) paradox: killing gently can be permissible even if killing is not).

1974 ‘Events and Past Events: Some Ontological Considerations’, in R. Severens, ed. (1974), pp. 111-34.

On whether there is an existent past. Holds that "to assert the occurrence of an event and to use warrantably an event concept must be taken to be the same thing" [p. 119]. Events do not exist--they occur; they happen. But "to say events occur is not to say something general or metaphysical about events; it is to say something about the manner in which event assertions are justified and what sort of implications can be drawn from an event assertion" [p. 122]. Comments in Berersluis (1974).

1963 ‘Causation and the Identification of Action. Comments on Donald Davidson’s "Actions, Reasons, and Causes"’, The Journal of Philosophy, 60, 700-01.

Issues a plea for "the criteria of identity for actions, the grounds for distinguishing them both from one another and from their reasons and consequences, and the extent to which these reasons and consequences in turn determine the identity, specific if not numerical, of actions" [p. 701].

An extensive study, aiming "to bring Aristotle’s pioneering contribution into direct and detailed contact with contemporary work" [p. ix]. Chapter 1 argues that "Aristotle’s treatment of the identity and individuation conditions for processes offers an intermediate position between that occupied by Davidson and Goldman" [p. 31]. Chapter 2 focuses on Aristotle’s use of his ontology of processes to discuss the identity and location of actions. See also Chapter 5 on Aristotle’s account of action explanation.

Argues that one of the basic axioms in Segerberg’s system (1989a, 1989b) is too strong.

1984 Topics in the Syntax and Semantics of Infinitives and Gerunds, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Massachusetts at Amherst; published New York: Garland, 1989.

1989a ‘Introduction’, in G. Chierchia, B. H. Partee, and R. Turner, eds., Properties, Types and Meaning, Volume II: Semantic Issues, Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 1-20.

1989b ‘Structured Meanings, Thematic Roles and Control’, in G. Chierchia, B. H. Partee, and R. Turner, eds., Properties, Types and Meaning, Volume II: Semantic Issues, Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 131-66.

Following the property exemplification approach of Kim (1966, 1969, 1973a), construes eventualities as atomic units of information.

1995a ‘Individual-level Predicates as Inherent Generics’, in G. N. Carlson and F. J. Pelletier, eds., The Generic Book, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, pp. 176-223.

In contrast to Kratzer (1995), argues that all predicates (stage-level as well as individual-level) have a Davidsonian extra argument ranging over eventualities; however, in individual-level predicates this argument is bound by a generic operator, and that accounts for the difference.

1995b Dynamics of Meaning. Anaphora, Presupposition, and the Theory of Grammar, Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press.

Includes a discussion of adverbs of quantification and if/when-clauses as involving quantification over eventlike entities [pp. 99ff].

1991 Meaning and Grammar. An Introduction to Semantics, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press.

Chapter 8 ("Word Meaning") includes a presentation of an event-based theory of semantic roles along the lines set forth in Carlson (1984) and Dowty (1989).

1994 Causality, Interpretation, and the Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

1964 ‘The Descriptive Element in the Concept of Action’, The Journal of Philosophy, 61, 613-24.

Maintains that an action is the bringing about of an event. Compare von Wright (1963) and K. Bach (1980) for related views.

1965 ‘Query on Substitutivity’, in R. S. Cohen and M. W. Wartofsky, eds., Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. II, New York: Humanities Press, pp. 275-77.

Singular causal statements are not extensional with respect to the contained singular terms. Discussion in L. H. Davis (1974).

1966 ‘Freedom and Action’, in K. Lehrer, ed., Freedom and Determinism, New York: Random House, pp. 11-44.

1967a ‘Comments on D. Davidson’s "The Logical Form of Action Sentences"’, in Rescher, ed. (1967), pp. 113-14.

Offers linguistic evidence to support the view that events fall into a category close to universals (e.g., they can recur) by analysing sentences such as "There is a stroll that he takes every afternoon". Davidson’s reply in (1967b).

1967b ‘"He Could Have Done Otherwise"’, The Journal of Philosophy, 44, 409-18; revised version reprinted in J. H. Gill, ed., Philosophy Today No. 1, New York: Macmillan, 1968, pp. 236-49.

Gives an analysis of the conditions under which "undertaking to make a certain event happen" is in the agent’s power.

1969a ‘Some Puzzles About Agency’, in K. Lambert, ed., The Logical Way of Doing Things. Philosophical Essays in Honor of Henry S. Leonard, New Haven: Yale University Press, pp. 199-218.

In the case of actions, causation relates persons to events. Consequently actions are caused, but determinism, which concerns causation by events, is supposed not to touch the belief that actions are free (compare Chisholm 1976a and Hornsby 1980a).

1969b ‘Language, Logic, and States of Affairs’, in S. Hook, ed., Language and Philosophy, New York: New York University Press, pp. 241-48.

Outline of the theory of events as states of affairs further developed in (1970, 1971a, 1976a).

1970 ‘Events and Propositions’, Noûs, 4, 15-24; reprinted in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 89-98.

A debate with Davidson on the ontology of events. Moving from the assumption that "any theory of events should be adequate to the fact of recurrence, to the fact that there are some things that recur, or happen more than once" [p. 15], puts forward a theory of events as a species of states of affairs: "A proposition could be defined as any state of affairs which is necessarily such that either it or its negation always occurs [...] An event is any contingent state of affairs which is not a proposition and which implies change (i.e., which implies that there is some state of affairs p such that p occurs and not-p occurs)" [p. 20]. The account also includes an outline of how talk of particular occurrences of events can be reduced to talk of the occurring and failing to occur of such general recurring events. Reply in Davidson (1970a). Compare also Wierenga (1976) and Lombard (1977) for critical discussion.

A reply to Davidson (1970a), and a new challenge: "Consider that entity which, according to Davidson’s analysis, Sebastian is said to stroll. Could some other person have strolled it? Could Sebastian have strolled it in Florence instead of in Bologna? Or, had he not strolled it, could he have done something else with it instead? It would be unphilosophical [...] to reject such questions--if one assumes that there really is a certain concrete thing that Sebastian strolls" [p. 182]. Davidson’s reply in (1971b). Further developments in Chisholm (1985a).

1971b ‘On the Logic of Intentional Action’, in R. Binkley, R. Bronaugh, and A. Marras, eds. (1971), pp. 38-69.

An improvement over the system of concepts set forth in (1964, 1966, 1969), including a summary of the underlying ontology of states of affairs, which "is quite different from that which is presupposed by Donald Davidson’s account of agency" [p. 41, n.5]. For instance, "We should resist the temptation to say such things as that the inauguration of Mr. Johnson’s successor and the inauguration of Mr. Nixon are ‘the same individual state of affairs’. For they are different states of affairs" [p. 41]. Commented by Aune (1971).

1971c ‘Reply’, in R. Binkley, R. Bronaugh, and A. Marras, eds. (1971), pp. 76-80.

A reply to Aune (1971), clarifying issues about agent causation, the definition of "basic action", and the iterability of "He makes it happen that" discussed in (1971b).

Chapter 4 defends the view that events, like propositions, constitute a subspecies of states of affairs. The following characterization is given: "p is an event =df p is a state of affairs which is such that: (i) it occurs; (ii) it is not a proposition; and (iii) it entails a property g which is such that (a) only individual things can exemplifiy g, (b) it is possible that no individual things exemplify g, and (c) g is not such that it may be rooted outside the times at which it is had" [p. 128]. On causality: "there are events that cause the events that agents cause, but [...] these events, unlike other events, are not sufficient conditions for their effects" [p. 69] (see Chisholm 1969a).

1976b ‘The Agent as Cause’, in M. Brand and D. Walton, eds. (1976), pp. 199-212.

Defines agent causation in terms of event causation and of the undefined concept of "undertaking": "S contributes causally at t to p =df Either (a) S does something at t that contributes causally to p, or (b) there is a q such that S undertakes q at t and S-undertaking-q is p, or (c) there is an r such that S does something at t that contributes causally to r, and p is that state of affairs which is S doing something that contributes causally to r" [p. 205]. See Thalberg’s (1976) comments.

1978 ‘Comments and Replies’, Philosophia, 7 [Special Issue on "The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm"], 597-636.

Includes replies to Corrado (1978), Goldman (1978), Lombard (1978c), Thalberg (1978d), and van Inwagen (1978b).

1979a ‘Events, Propositions and States of Affairs’, in P. Weingartner and E. Morscher, eds., Ontologie und Logik · Ontology and Logic. Vorträge und Diskussion eines Internationalen Kolloquiums · Proceedings of an International Colloquium , Berlin: Duncker & Humblodt, pp. 27-47.

Restatement of the view that events "constitute a certain subspecies of the genus states of affairs" [p. 41]. Definition D17 states that "e is an event =Df There is a nonempty set P of properties such that all the members of P can be had only by contingent things and none of the members of P may be rooted outside the times at which they are had; e is necessarily such that it obtains if and only if all members of P are exemplified" [p. 41]. Lists 22 definitions and 5 principles expressing Chisholm’s position on states of affairs, propositions, and events [pp. 46-47]. Compare the "Discussion" on pp. 48-51.

1979b ‘Possibility and States of Affairs’, in P. Weingartner and E. Morscher, eds., Ontologie und Logik · Ontology and Logic. Vorträge und Diskussion eines Internationalen Kolloquiums · Proceedings of an International Colloquium , Berlin: Duncker & Humblodt, pp. 53-57.

Reply to a conference discussion of (1979a). Includes a clarification of the relation between possibility and states of affairs.

1979c ‘Austin’s Philosophical Papers’, in K. T. Fann, ed., A Symposium on J. L. Austin, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, pp. 101-26.

Includes a criticism of Austin (1950), reconstructing the controversy with Strawson (1950) on the thesis that facts are things in the world. Chisholm sides with Strawson.

1979d ‘Objects and Persons: Revisions and Replies’, Grazer philosophische Studien, 7/8 [special issue "Essays in the Philosophy of R. M. Chisholm", also published as E. Sosa, ed. (1979)], 317-88.

Includes replies to Anscombe (1979b), Donagan (1979), Kim (1979a), Pollock (1979), Wolterstorff (1979). Cfr. especially Section B [pp. 342-61] on the state-of-affairs theory of events and Section C [pp. 362-72] on action and causation.

1980 ‘Brentano als analytischer Metaphysiker’ [‘Brentano as an Analytic Metaphysician’, in German], Conceptus, 28/30, 77-82; reprinted with revisions as ‘Beginnings and Endings’, in P. van Inwagen, ed. (1980), pp. 17-25; further revised version in Chisholm’s Brentano and Meinong Studies, Amsterdam and Atlanta, GA: Editions Rodopi, 1982, pp. 114-24.

1985a ‘Adverbs and Subdeterminates’, in E. LePore and B. P. McLaughlin, eds. (1985), pp. 324-28.

Contrasts the relation of property subdetermination (holding e.g. between the property color and the property red: only red can instantiate the formula color + X = red) to the more common case of properties falling under other properties (e.g. brother’s falling under male) and applies the distinction to adverbs. Thus "strolling swiftly is a subordinate under strolling", whereas "strolling in Bologna is equivalent to the coordinate pair strolling and being in Bologna" [p. 328].

1985b ‘The Structure of States of Affairs’, in B. Vermazen and M. B. Hintikka, eds. (1985), pp. 107-14.

Going back to the debate with Davidson (1970a, 1971b) on the nature of events : "I hope that I can persuade Davidson that the concept [of a state of affairs] is a powerful one and that he might do well consider it when he completes his theory of recurrence and possibility" [p. 107]. Definition: "p is a state of affairs =df p is possibly such that there is someone who accepts it; and there is something which obtains and which is necessarily such that whoever conceives it conceives p" [p. 109]. Characterizes the internal structure of states of affairs in terms of conjunctions, negations, and disjunctions, and their "intentional criteria of identity" in terms of mutual involvement and entailment.

1985/6 ‘On the Positive and Negative States of Things’, Grazer philosophische Studien, 25/26, 97-106; reprinted with revisions as Ch. 16 of Chisholm 1989 (entitled ‘States and Events’), pp. 150-55.

Outlines new ontological foundations for a theory of events, centered on a twofold dichotomy between contingent/non-contingent and dependent/independent. "x is an event" is defined as "there is a y such that y is a contingent substance and x is a contingent state of y" [p. 103].

1986 ‘Self-Profile’, in R. J. Bogdan, ed., Roderick M. Chisholm, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 3-77.

Section F [pp. 56-64] reviews and updates Chisholm’s views on actions and events.

Chapter 16 (‘States and Events’) is a revised version (1985/6). Chapter 18 (‘The Categories’) is a summary "of the ontology here set forth" [p. vii].

Developing on the account of (1985/6), marks a departure from the early theory of events as states of affairs in favor of a theory of events as "contingent states of contingent things". This view is argued to be in the spirit of Kim’s (1969, 1973a, 1976) except that times are not assumed to be constitutive elements of events. In fact, "everything we know about the nature of events and everything we know about any particular event may be expressed without presupposing that there are such things as ‘times’. There seems to me to be no sufficient reason, therefore, to suppose that this temporal world includes such entities as ‘times’" [p. 425].

1990b ‘Referring to Things That No Longer Exist’, in J. Tomberlin, ed. (1990), pp. 545-56.

1992 ‘The Basic Ontological Categories’, in K. Mulligan, ed., Language, Truth and Ontology, Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 1-13.

Further thoughts on the new (1985/6, 1990a) theory of events as contingent states of contingent things. A beginning is a state that neither did nor will exemplifiy anything; a process is a state that will include a beginning, and a change is either a process or a beginning.

1994 ‘Ontologically Dependent Entities’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 54, 499-507.

Includes an outline of the theory of events as contingent states (see 1985/6, 1990a, 1992): events are either first-order states, i.e., states of substances, or second-order states (states of first-order states), where it is assumed that "for every x, there is the state, x-being-F, if, and only if, x is F" [p. 504].

1995 ‘Agents, Causes, and Events: The Problem of Free Will’, in T. W. O’Connor, ed. (1995), pp. 95-100.

1996 A Realistic Theory of Categories. An Essay in Ontology, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Thorough presentation of Chisholm’s recent views, including an elaboration of the conception of events as contingent states (see 1985/6, 1990a, 1992, 1994). See especially Chapter 10 ("States and Events", pp. 71-84).

1994 ‘Skeptical and Credulous Event Calculi for Supporting Modal Queries’, in A. Cohn, ed., Proceedings of the 11th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 94), Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 361-65.

On dealing with partially ordered sequences of events in Kowalski and Sergot’s (1986) event calculus.

1970 ‘Remarks on Nominalization’, in R. A. Jacobs and P. S. Rosenbaum, eds., Readings in English Transformational Grammar, Waltham, MA: Ginn and Co., pp. 184-221; reprinted in N. Chomsky, Studies on Semantics in Generative Grammar, The Hague: Mouton, 1972, pp. 11‑61.

Analyses three types of nominals: gerundive (John’s refusing the offer), derivative (John’s refusal of the offer), and mixed (John’s refusing of the offer).

Some action verbs (such as ‘learn’, ‘find’) imply an attainment of the desired goal; others (‘study’, ‘look for’) do not imply such an achievement but presuppose an active attempt. It is suggested that the controversy over such verbs as ‘kill’ might profit from an analysis in terms of these features.

1970 ‘The Logical Character of Action-Explanations’, The Philosophical Review, 79, 214-36.

Elaborates on the view that explanations of human action conform to the deductive-nomological pattern.

A defense of the view that facts exist based on a rebuttal of the view that they are the objects of singular reference.

Seminal paper. Gives an account of adverbial modification that does not require the postulation of events in the domain of quantification (unlike Davidson’s 1967a analysis): predicate modifiers are first-order operators interpreted semantically as mappings from properties to properties [p. 132]. Compare T. Parsons’s similar account in (1970).

Outline of an "adverbial logic" in the spirit of (1970) (though no reference to the earlier paper is made) as an answer to the question: "Is it possible to analyse sentences with predicate modifiers in such a way that the analysis satisfies the [requirements] of Kenny’s problem but does so without invoking references to events, states, and the like?" [p. 32]. Comments in Kleiner (1974).

1975 ‘Facts, Fact-Correlates, and Fact-Surrogates’, in P. Welsh, ed., Fact, Value, and Perception: Essays in Honor of Charles A. Baylis, Durham: Duke University Press, pp. 3-17.

Suggests that Baylis’s (1948) fact-based analysis of a sentence such as ‘Mary is making pies’ matches (and anticipates) Davidson’s (1967a) event-based analysis of action sentences.

1986a ‘Predication and Paronymous Modifiers’, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 27, 376-92.

In the framework of Clark (1970) suggests a way of dealing with the invalidity of inferences such as "This is a fake Picasso. Ergo, this is a Picasso".

1986b ‘Murderers Are Not Obliged to Murder: Another Solution to Forrester’s Paradox’, Philosophical Papers, 15, 51-57.

Argues that the distinction introduced by Sinnot-Armstrong (1985) to solve Forrester’s (1984) paradox can be preserved within an "adverbial" theory without commitment to Davidson’s (1967a) analysis of action sentences.

1989 ‘Deeds, Doings, and What is Done: The Non-Extensionality of Modifiers’, Noûs, 23, 199-210.

1973 Leibniz’s Doctrine of Individual Accidents (Studia Leibnitiana, Sonderheft 4), Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner.

Individuates in Leibniz the first traces of a doctrine of events as particular accidents (as discussed by J. Bennett 1988, § 36). Compare Leibniz’s New Essays, IV-vi-42.

1987 ‘Change, Process and Events’, Stanford: Center for the Study of Language and Information, Report No. CSLI-87-95.

Argues against the idea that a change can be represented by a sequence of durationless entities. Proposes an account which distinguishes between events, processes, and states: "Like a phase, a state is a timeless entity (a universal) which may or may not be instantiated. In contrast, processes and events are concrete particulars: a process may be thought of as on-going activity of changing (an instance of a way of becoming different); an event may be thought of as a real change, where a real change involves the termination of a process in an actual state" [p. 23].

1990 ‘The Difference Between Real Change and Mere Cambridge Change’, Philosophical Studies, 60, 257-80.

A discussion of Geach’s (1969) notion of "mere Cambridge change", leading to an account of "real" change which takes seriously the idea that changing objects actually become different.

1991 ‘On the Individuation of Events’, Synthese, 86, 229-54; reprinted in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 373-98.

An account of events in terms of time-ordered exemplifications of differing states by particularized determinable properties, or "concrete phases": events are "unrepeatable individuals whose identity conditions can be formulated in terms of sameness of concrete phase, time-ordered pair of differing states and times" [p. 245]. This position agrees with Lombard (1986) in taking events to be first and foremost changes, but resembles the approach adumbrated by Quinton (1979) and J. Bennett (1988) in analysing events in terms of particularized properties, or "tropes".

Offers an explication of causation based on a generalization of D. K. Lewis’s (1973) notion of nomic dependence between events.

1977 ‘An Essential Difference between Momentary and Durative Events’, in W. A. Beach, S. E. Foz, and S. Philosoph, eds., Papers from the Thirteenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, pp. 93-103.

Argues that there are verbs that denote truly instantaneous events (as opposed to extended events treated as instantaneous for pragmatic reasons).

1967a ‘Can a Single Action Have Many Different Descriptions?’, Inquiry, 10, 164-80.

Answers the title question in the negative. For, "can there be justice in our praise or blame when everything depends upon which description we select to judge a man’s action under?" [p. 165]. Comments in Dowling (1967) and reply in Cody (1967b). Compare also Rayfield (1970).

Accepts the analogy between descriptions of actions and descriptions of material objects pointed out by Dowling (1967), but rejects the contention that there are many true descriptions of material objects. Concludes that the claim that there are not many true descriptions of an action is not affected by the analogy.

"I am tempted to conclude that there is no category of human action. But before drawing such a conclusion an ancient but terrible question must be faced: What sort of things happen in the world? This ancient question is faced but not answered. It is brought up because the failure to find a satisfactory answer to the question, Is human action a category? is a failure even to find a satisfactory assumption about what kind of reference the term ‘human action’ is supposed to have" [p. 386, Abstract].

1969 ‘The Same Action’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 70, 75-90.

Rich discussion of various issues that have dominated the literature in the years to follow. Argues that Davidson’s (1967a) analysis of action sentences, when combined with the idea that one action can be described in different ways, generates "absurdities". Example: If x’s pulling the trigger and x’s shooting the victim with a revolver are the same action, the analysis implies that x pulled the trigger with a revolver. (See T. Parsons 1980, B. Taylor 1985, Wiggins 1985/6, Widerker 1988 for similar criticisms; Davidson 1985b for replies.) Discusses identity criteria, especially sameness of spatio-temporal location (Lemmon 1967). Argues that it is impossible to speak of an event without referring to an event of some kind. Also, one must draw "a distinction between an expression which says what an action is, and an expression which describes an action already identified" [p. 84].

Argues that knowledge of singular causal statements does not require knowledge of causal laws.

1984 ‘Action, Causality, and Teleological Explanation’, in P. A. French, T. Uehling, and H. K. Wettstein, eds. (1984), pp. 345-69.

Argues against Davidson’s (1963) thesis that reasons are causes. Includes a discussion of teleological explanations of events that are not actions.

1995 ‘Two Kinds of Action: A Phenomenological Study’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 4, 799-819.

Distinguishes between "mimeomorphic actions", which actors try (or are satisfied) to carry out in the same way (in like situations), and "polymorphic actions" (all other actions). "The importance of the distinction lies in the possibility of mimicking mimeomorphic action through the reproduction of behaviour alone, whereas polymorphic actions can only be reproduced by those who understand them sufficiently to comprehend the subtle interplay of situation and appropriate behaviour" [p. 800].

1976a ‘The Syntax of Action Nominals: A Cross-Language Study’, Lingua, 40, 177-201.

Analyses action nominal constructions in their relationship to corresponding full sentences, drawing examples from a number of languages.

1976b Aspect: An Introduction to the Study of Verbal Aspect and Related Problems, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Puts the distinction between events and processes in aspectual perspective: "The term ‘process’ means a dynamic situation viewed imperfectively, and the term ‘event’ means a dynamic situation viewed perfectively" [p. 51].

An extensive study. Characterizes tense as the grammaticalized expression of the location in time of "situations", general term used to cover "events, states, processes, etc." [p.5].

1986 ‘Tense and Discourse Location in Situation Semantics’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 9, 17-36.

Exploits some notions of Barwise and Perry’s situation semantics (1981b, 1983) for a treatment of tense and discourse.

1971 ‘Comments’, in R. Binkley, R. Bronaugh, and A. Marras, eds. (1971), pp. 26-37.

On Davidson (1971a). Objects to the characterization of a person P being the agent of an event a in terms of P’s intentions and descriptions of a. Also discusses Davidson’s argument to the effect that agent-causality conceived as something irreducibly different from event-causation is of no value for an account of agency.

1978 ‘The Case for States of Affairs’, Philosophia, 7 [Special Issue on "The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm"], 523-35.

A discussion of Chisholm’s views on states of affairs. Includes an argument to the effect that the existence of de re beliefs suggests that the objects of belief are not states of affairs but rather Davidsonian concrete events. Reply in Chisholm (1978).

1981 Seeing and Other Complex Events, Doctoral Dissertation, Ohio State University.

Argues "that a theory of events is needed to uncover the constituents of an event as seeing, and that unless an event of seeing is analysable into constituents, it is difficult to explain how a scientific account of seeing and a philosophical account can be about the same event" [Abstract]. Urges an account of the event-part relation. Actions are complex events (a variety of causings). Includes a defense of the property exemplification theory of Kim and Goldman against the views of Davidson, Anscombe, Brand, Thomson.

1992 Agency in Action. The Practical Rational Agency Machine, Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Argues that the B‑theory of time (Mellor, Oaklander) "violates the implication relations in its truth conditions of tensed sentences [...] and conflates the truth conditions with the grounds of truth of tensed sentences" [p. 26].

Examines the "final line of defense" available to the endorsers of the B‑theory of time, presenting it as a tu quoque argument: "If the A-theorist’s argument for the reality of tense are correct, then there must be spatially ‘tensed’ facts as well, which no one will admit" [p. 249].

1982 ‘Mental Events Must Have Spatial Location’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 63, 270-74.

Mental events must have spatial location (unless one adopts a solipsistic view) because the special theory of relativity implies that events occurring in public time must occur in public space.

1995 ‘Causation’, in A. C. Grayling, ed., Philosophy. A Guide through the Subject, Oxford: Oxford University Press, pp. 184-93.

Treats adverbs, adjectives, and prepositions as predicate modifiers along the lines of R. Clark (1970) and T. Parsons (1970).

1974 ‘Adverbs and Events’, Synthese, 28, 455-81; reprinted with minor revisions in Cresswell (1985b), pp. 13-39.

Proposes a way of incorporating Montague’s and Davidson’s treatments of adverbs into the framework of l-categorial languages set forth in Cresswell (1973). Gives some arguments in support of both approaches.

1977 ‘Interval Semantics and Logical Words’, in Rohrer, ed. (1977), pp. 7-29; reprinted with a new Appendix in Cresswell (1985b), pp. 67-95.

On analyzing logical connectives and quantifiers within the framework of "interval semantics", where the meanings of sentences are sets of world-time pairs, in which the time is an interval rather than a single point.

1979a ‘Adverbs of Space and Time’, in F. Guenthner and S. J. Schmidt, eds., Formal Semantics and Pragmatics for Natural Languages, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 171-99; reprinted in Cresswell (1985b), pp. 41-66.

A return to the view of adverbs as modifiers, after the "flirtation" with Davidson’s (1967a) account in Cresswell (1974). Arguments are centered on an analysis of the adverb ‘quickly’.

1979b ‘Interval Semantics for Some Event Expressions’, in R. Bäuerle, U. Egli, and A. von Stechow, eds., Semantics from Different Points of View, Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, pp. 90-116; reprinted in Cresswell (1985b), pp. 143-71.

Further developments of the predicate modifier account of adverbials. Against Davidson’s (1967a) approach, argues that "the basic problem is the question of whether events stand in certain logical relations" [p. 144]; for instance, what is the relation between an event such as the arrival of the train and a non-event (whatever that is) such as the non-arrival of the train?

1981 ‘Adverbs of Causation’, in H.-J. Eikmeyer and H. Rieser, eds., Words, Worlds, and Contexts, Berlin: de Gruyter, pp. 21-37; reprinted in Cresswell (1985b), pp. 173-92.

Analyses the semantics of adverbs whose meaning contains a causal element; the analysis exploits D. K. Lewis’s (1973) possible-worlds account of causality.

1985b Adverbial Modification: Interval Semantics and Its Rivals, Dordrecht: Reidel.

A collection of essays on adverbial modification within truth-conditional semantics. Includes reprints of Cresswell (1974, 1977, 1978a, 1979b, 1981) as well as an introductory survey and a previously unpublished chapter on "Adverbial Modification in Situation Semantics" [pp. 193-220].

1985c Structured Meanings: The Semantics of Propositional Attitudes, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press/Bradford Books.

"Events, if needed at all, are needed because certain phrases do not behave like sentences or other inflected clauses. To be sure, the question then arises whether events should be taken as unanalysed particulars or should, as I would prefer to do, be themselves analysed in terms of, say, possible worlds, times, individuals, and the like" [p. 174].

1985d Review of Barwise and Perry (1983), The Philosophical Review, 94, 293-96.

1986 ‘Why Objects Exist but Events Occur’, Studia Logica, 45, 371-75; reprinted in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 449-53.

Within the framework of Interval Semantics, argues that the difference between events (on the one hand) and states and objects (on the other) is that the former lack, while the latter have, the "sub-interval property" (stative sentences are true at an interval t only if they are true at every sub-interval of t; eventive sentences need not). This feature is reflected in the existence/occurrence distinction: "Things which have the sub-interval property do or do not exist; while things that lack that property do or do not occur" [p. 373]. Compare Hacker (1982b).

1987 Review of B. Taylor (1985), Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 65, 214-16.

1988 ‘The World Situation (It’s a Small World after all)’, in Semantical Essays. Possible Worlds and Their Rivals, Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 65-77.

A criticism of situation semantics based on the view that "the so-called ‘situations’ are made to play roles that in possible-worlds semantics are played by entities of several quite different kinds", viz. possible worlds, propositions, individuals (among which events). Includes an argument against the existence of disjunctive events.

1991 ‘Adverbial Modification in l-Categorial Languages’, in A. von Stechow and D. Wunderlich, eds., Semantics. An International Handbook of Contemporary Research, Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, pp. 748-57.

1994 Language in the World. A Philosophical Inquiry, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

1984 ‘The Representation of Adverbs, Adjectives and Events in Logical Form’, Menlo Park, CA: SRI International, AI Center, Technical Note No. 344.

Addresses the criteria for relating surface forms to logical form representations, focusing on issues that have bearing on the relation of properties to events.

1991 Syntactic Categories and Grammatical Relations. The Cognitive Organization of Information, Chicago and London: Chicago University Press.

1992 ‘Counterfactuals and Event Causation’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 70, 307-23.

An attempt to "rehabilitate and clarify" the connection between counterfactual dependence and event causation, assuming that "almost every event has an unimaginably complicated lattice of causes extending indefinitely into the past" [p. 307]. Includes criticisms of D. K. Lewis’s (1973) original account.

1988 ‘Autonomy, Predication, and Thematic Relations’, in W. Wilkins, ed., Syntax and Semantics, Volume 21, Thematic Relations, New York: Academic Press, pp. 37-60.

"Thematic relations are grounded in the elements that constitute our mental representation of events" [p. 37].

1972 ‘On an Argument for Truth-Functionality’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 9, 265-69.

A criticism of the "slingshot" argument. It is argued that singular causal statements provide a counterexample to the thesis that a referentially transparent context allowing substitution of logically equivalent sentences salva veritate is truth-functional.

1981 ‘Six Tenets for Event Perception’, Cognition, 10, 71-78; reprinted in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 509-16.

Some important structural invariants ground event perception. To perceive an event is to pick out these invariant structures in the environment. Some of these invariants are spatial, and concern event localization, spatial distribution, and relation to an observer; other invariants are dynamic, and concern the flow of event phases. More importantly, some invariants are present in the coordination of event phases to one another, and are hierarchically organized.

1981 ‘On the Definition of the Telic-Atelic (Bounded-Nonbounded) Distinction’, in P. Tedeschi and A. Zaenen, eds. (1981), pp. 79-90.

An analysis of the telic-atelic distinction and its ramifications. Compare the instructive table on p. 80, where 15 alternative versions of the distinction (including e.g. the activity-accomplishment and activity-performance distinction of Vendler 1957 and Kenny 1963, respectively) are tabulated. Includes a discussion of questions such as: What is the distinction about (e.g., processes and actions or the verb phrases used to express them)? What is the relevant notion of boundedness, or goal-reaching, in terms of which the distinction is often formulated?

A general study of tense-aspect systems in natural languages. Chapter 3 on "Aspectual Categories". The introductory chapter includes some ontological remarks to the effect that the taxonomy of "situations" (general cover term for the "events, processes, states, etc. that verbs signify") "is not one of situations but rather one of descriptions or characterizations of situations [...] since one and the same (individual) situation may be described in different ways" [pp. 27-28].

1988 Naive Semantics for Natural Language Understanding, Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers.

Chapter 4 ("Verb interpretation", pp. 79ff) contains interesting material on Vendler’s classification of events and Aktionsarten.

1995 ‘A Linguistic Ontology’ International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 43 [special issue on "The Role of Formal Ontology in the Information Technology", N. Guarino and R. Poli, eds.], 809-18.

1978 ‘Reference, Truth-Functionality, and Causal Connectives’, Analysis, 38, 99-106.

An extended act is "an act done by doing other acts, where doing it takes longer than doing any of those other acts [...] and where each of those acts is done in order to do it" [p. 258]. Argues that the parts of an extended act are variable and alterable. Discusses some applications of the concept.

1963 ‘What We Can Do’, The Journal of Philosophy, 60, 435-45; reprinted in N. Care and C. Landesman, eds. (1968), pp. 113-26.

A gloss on the tenet that not every action is a basic action (in the sense made clear in Danto 1965).

1965 ‘Basic Actions’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 2, 141-48; reprinted in A. R. White, ed. (1968), pp. 43-58; in N. Care and C. Landesman, eds. (1968), pp. 93-112; and in M. Brand, ed. (1970), pp. 255-66.

"If there are any actions at all, there must be two distinct kinds of actions: those performed by an individual M, which he may be said to have caused to happen; and those actions, also performed by M, which he cannot be said to have caused to happen. The latter I shall designate as basic actions" [p. 256].

1966 ‘Freedom and Forbearance’, in K. Lehrer, ed., Freedom and Determinism, New York: Random House, pp. 45-65.

1969 ‘Complex Events’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 30, 66-77.

Persons are complex entities in that complex events typically constitute portions of their characteristic histories. Definition: "a complex event [...] will contain at least one distinct event as a proper part, without being non-residually resoluble into events of the lowest-order externally conjoined by event-connectives. Rather, in addition to its atomic parts, the complex event will contain a non-eventival remnant" [p. 71]. For instance, "the event described as "m does a" [mDa]--an action performed by m--is a complex event. It is, to begin with, an event. It contains another event as a proper part, namely a. Finally, if a is subtracted from mDa there is left a non-eventival remnant in the respect that there can be no event which can stand on its own and be truly described with mD: there is no doing which is not the doing of something [...] no atto puro, mental or otherwise" [p. 71].

1970 ‘Causation and Basic Actions. A Reply En Passant to Professor Margolis’, Inquiry, 13 [Special Issue on "Action"], 108-25.

A detailed reply to Margolis (1970), including arguments to the effect that "basic actions can be caused, even by actions of their own agent: they are basic only in not having distinct actions of his as components" [p. 108].

"One strain which runs throughout my book is that these two typical ways of relating to the world--acting upon and coming to know it--have frequently parallel structures--that what I term here the ‘logical architecture’ of knowledge and action are of a piece, or nearly of a piece" [p. xi]. In the case of actions, "that which corresponds to the object in knowledge is an event" [p. 31].

1979 ‘Basic Actions and Basic Concepts’, The Review of Metaphysics, 32, 471-85.

Given a characterization of what it means for an action to be a basic one, focuses on the question of what makes a basic action an action.

1963 ‘Actions, Reasons, and Causes’, The Journal of Philosophy, 60, 685-700; reprinted in Davidson (1980b), pp. 3-20. Also in B. Berofsky, ed., Free Will and Determinism, New York: Harper and Row, 1966, pp. 221-40; in M. Brodbeck, ed., Readings in the Philosophy of the Social Sciences, New York: Macmillan, 1968, pp. 44-58; in J. Margolis, ed., An Introduction to Philosophical Inquiry. Contemporary and Classical Sources, New York: Knopf, 1968, pp. 199-211 (2nd edition 1977); in N. Care and C. Landesman, eds. (1968), pp. 179-98; in A. R. White, ed. (1968), pp. 79-94; in M. Brand, ed. (1970), pp. 67-79; in S. Gendin and R. Hoffman, eds., Introduction to Philosophy: a Contemporary Perspective, New York: Scribner’s, 1970; in H. S. Broudy, ed., Philosophical Dimensions of Educational Research, New York: John Wiley and Sons, 1971; in S. Davis, ed., Causal Theories of Mind. Action, Knowledge, Memory, Perception, and Reference, Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1983, pp. 58-72.

Seminal article. Argues that some reasons are causes, and that the cause of an action A is the "primary reason" why an agent performed A, i.e., the pair consisting of a pro attitude of the agent towards actions with a certain property and the agent’s belief that A has that property. The view is defended that teleological explanation of action does not essentially involve laws but can, and sometimes must, invoke causal connections.

1967a ‘The Logical Form of Action Sentences’, in N. Rescher ed. (1967), pp. 81-95; reprinted in D. Davidson and G. Harman, eds., The Logic of Grammar, Encino, CA: Dickenson, 1975, pp. 235-45; in Davidson (1980b), pp. 105-22; and in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 3-17.

Seminal semantic analysis of sentences containing verbs or noun phrases that seem to refer to events or actions. The proposal is that "verbs of action [...] should be construed as containing a place, for singular terms or variables, that they do not appear to" [p. 92]. For instance, a sentence like ‘Shem kicked Shaun’ is given the form ($x)(Kicked (Shem, Shaun, x)), i.e. "There is an event x such that x was a kicking of Shaun by Shem". Adverbial modification is then accounted for in terms of predication of events, so that, for instance, "Jones buttered the toast at midnight" is analysed as "($x)(Buttered (Jones, the toast, x) & at midnight (x))". This provides a way of solving Kenny’s (1963) problem of the "variable polyadicity" of action verbs. The analysis marks a very influential step in the discussion on events and event-based semantics and is referred to widely in the subsequent literature.

1967b ‘Replies to Comments’, in N. Rescher, ed. (1967), 115-20; reprinted (somewhat edited) in Davidson (1980b), pp. 123-29.

Replies to Lemmon (1967), Chisholm (1967a) and Castañeda (1967) on Davidson (1967a).

1967c ‘Causal Relations’, The Journal of Philosophy, 64, 691-703; reprinted in Beauchamp, ed. (1974), pp. 190-99; in E. Sosa, ed. (1975), pp. 82-94; in M. Brand, ed. (1976), pp. 355-67; in Davidson (1980b), pp. 149-62; in E. Sosa and M. Tooley, eds. (1993), pp. 75-87; and in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 401-13.

Application of the (1967a) theory to the analysis of the logical form of singular causal statements. A sentence like ‘Brutus’s stab caused Caesar’s death’ is analysed as an existential quantification ($e)($e')(Stab(Brutus,e) & Death(Caesar,e') & Caused(e,e')), where the bound variables range over events. It follows that "We must distinguish firmly between causes and the features we hit on for describing them, and hence between the question whether a statement says truly that one event caused another and the further question whether the events are characterized in such a way that we can deduce, or otherwise infer, from laws or other causal lore, that the relation was causal" [p. 697]. See Vendler (1967c), Travis (1973), and Vision (1979) for early discussion.

1969a ‘The Individuation of Events’, in N. Rescher, ed., Essays in Honor of Carl G. Hempel, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 216-34; reprinted in Davidson (1980b), pp. 163-80, and in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 265-83.

Formulation of the thesis according to which "events are identical if and only if the have exactly the same causes and effects" [p. 231; see Nagel (1965)]: the causal nexus "provides for events a ‘comprehensive and continuously usable framework’ [quoting from Strawson (1959), p. 53] for the identification and description of events analogous in many ways to the space-time coordinate system for material objects" [p. 232]. Since Davidson maintains that all causes and effects are events (1967b), many authors have hastened to object that this criterion is open to a charge of circularity: see Beardsley (1975), Brand (1977, 1984), Quine (1985), Tiles (1976), Tye (1979), and N. L. Wilson (1974) inter alia.

1969b ‘On Events and Event-Descriptions’, in J. Margolis, ed. (1969), pp. 74-84; reprinted as ‘Reply to Martin’ in D. Davidson (1980a), pp. 129-37.

1970a ‘Events as Particulars’, Noûs, 4, 25-32; reprinted in Davidson (1980b), pp. 181-87, and in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 99-106.

Defends and elaborates the event ontology proposed in Davidson (1967a) in reply to Chisholm (1970). Argues that even if one accepts that there are event types, there still have to be singular, spatio-temporal located occurrences of particular events.

1970b ‘Mental Events’, in L. Foster and J. W. Swanson, eds., Experience and Theory, Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, pp. 79-101; reprinted in Davidson (1980b), pp. 207-27. Also in M. Burnyeat and T. Honderich, eds., Philosophy As It Is, Harmondsworth and New York: Penguin Books, 1979, pp. 213-38; in N. Block, ed., Readings in Philosophy of Psychology. Volume One, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1980, pp. 107-19; in D. M. Rosenthal, ed., The Nature of Mind, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 247-56; in B. Beakley and P. Ludlow, eds., The Philosophy of Mind: Classical Problems/Contemporary Issues, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press/Bradford Books, 1992, pp. 137-49; and in P. K. Moser and J. D. Trout, eds., Contemporary Materialism. A Reader, London and New York: Routledge, 1995, pp. 107-21.

Articulation of the identity theory of the mental and the physical known as "anomalous monism": each particular (token) mental event is a physical event in spite of the fact that mental types or properties are not nomologically correlated with physical ones. The assertion of supervenience of the mental on the physical reads: "There cannot be two events alike in all physical respects but differing in some mental respects" [1980b, p. 214].

1970c ‘Action and Reaction’, Inquiry, 13 [Special Issue on "Action"], 140-48; reprinted as ‘Reply to Cargile’ and ‘Reply to Hedman’ in Davidson (1980a), pp. 137-48.

Reply to Cargile (1970) concerning the notion of logical form underlying Davidson’s (1967a) account; reply to Hedman (1970b) elaborating on the view that "one and the same action may be correctly said to be intentional (when described in one way) and not intentional (when described in another)" [p. 147, following Anscombe (1957)].

1971a ‘Agency’, in R. Binkley, R. Bronaugh, and A. Marras, eds. (1971), pp. 3-25; reprinted in Davidson (1980b), pp. 43-61.

An examination of some central questions concerning agency: "What events in the life of a person reveal agency; what are his deeds and his doings in contrast to mere happenings in his history; what is the mark that distinguishes his actions?" [p. 3]. No definite answers are given, but one learns that there is no analysis of the relation between a person and an event, when it is her/his action, that does not appeal to the notion of intention. Originally commented by Cornman (1971).

1971b ‘Eternal vs. Ephemeral Events’, Noûs, 5, 335-49; reprinted in Davidson (1980b), pp. 189-203.

Continues the debate with Chisholm on the ontology of events: events are not recurrable entities. See Chisholm (1970), Davidson (1970a), Chisholm (1971a).

1973 ‘The Material Mind’, in P. Suppes, L. Henkin, G. C. Moisil, and A. Joja, eds., Logic, Methodology and Philosophy of Science IV, Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp. 709-22; reprinted in Davidson (1980b), pp. 245-59, and in J. Haugeland, ed., Mind Design, Montgomery, VT: Bradford Books, 1981, pp. 339-54.

"Suppose that we understand what goes on in the brain perfectly [...] The question is, what would all of this knowledge of physics (and a fortiori of neurophysiology) tell us about psychology? Much less than might be expected, I shall argue" [pp. 245-46]. Elaborates on the views put forward in (1970b).

1974 ‘Psychology as Philosophy’, in S. C. Brown, ed., Philosophy of Psychology, New York: Macmillan, pp. 41-52, 60-67; reprinted in J. Glover, ed., The Philosophy of Mind, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1976, pp. 101-110, and in Davidson (1980b), pp. 229-44.

Development of the arguments put forward in (1970b) against the possibility of strict psychophysical laws between mental and physical events.

1976 ‘Hempel on Explaining Action’, Erkenntnis, 10, 239-53; reprinted in Davidson (1980a), pp. 261-75.

A criticism of Hempel’s suggestion that intentional actions must be explained by referring inter alia to an empirical law according to which rational agents maximize expected value.

Brings together a number of comments and replies to comments concerning the analysis of action sentences introduced in Davidson (1967a). It includes Davidson (1967b) (with replies to Lemmon 1967, Chisholm 1967a, and Castañeda 1967), Davidson (1969b) (with comments on R. M. Martin 1969a), and Davidson (1970c) (with replies to Cargile 1970 and Hedman 1970b).

A reprint (with additions and corrections) of Davidson’s papers on actions and events, including (1963, 1967a, 1967b, 1967c, 1969a, 1969b, 1970a, 1970b, 1970c, 1971a, 1971b). Reviewed by Burge (1983), Carrier (1981b), Gryz (1983), Heal (1982), Hornsby (1982b), Lombard (1982b), White (1981).

1980c ‘Toward a Unified Theory of Meaning and Action’, Grazer philosophische Studien, 11, 1-12.

"Intention and intentional action won’t directly explain meaning. Rather, meaning, belief, and desire will be treated as fully coordinate elements in an understanding of action" [p. 2].

1985a ‘Reply to Quine on Events’, in E. LePore and B. P. McLaughlin, eds. (1985), pp. 172-76.

Withdrawal of the causal criterion of event identity (1969a) in favor of the criterion put forward by Quine (1950) and Lemmon (1967) criterion: "events, like physical objects, are identical if they occupy the same places at the same times" [p.175]. But this does not imply an assimilation of events with material objects: "For events and objects may be related to locations in space-time in different ways; it may be, for example, that events occur at a time in a place while objects occupy places at times". Thus, "the undulations of the ocean cannot be identified with the wave or the sum of waves that cross the sweep of ocean [...] One is an object which remains the same object through changes, the other a change in an object or objects. Spatio-temporal areas do not distinguish them, but our predicates, our basic grammar, our ways of sorting do" [p. 176].

1985b ‘Adverbs of Action’, in B. Vermazen and M. B. Hintikka, eds. (1985), 230-41.

A refined restatement of the (1967a) theory along with a lucid account of how it can meet various objections put forward in the literature. Thus, adverbs such as ‘deliberately’ are best treated as adsentences, and contextual adverbs such as ‘slowly’ are argued to be on a par with familiar attributive adjectives such as ‘large’ and ‘tall’. On the time-of-a-killing issue (Goldman 1971, Thomson 1971a): her pulling of the trigger was her killing of the victim--even if he died later--because that action of hers resulted in his death (compare J. Bennett 1973). Likewise, the identity between Jones’ alerting the burglar and Jones’ turning on the light does not imply that Jones turned on the burglar and alerted the light (pace T. Parsons 1980; an objection also raised by M. Cohen 1969): Jones’ alerting the burglar was his doing something (= his turning on of the light) that caused the burglar to be alerted.

1985c ‘Replies to Essays I-IX’, in B. Vermazen and M. B. Hintikka, eds. (1985), pp. 195-229.

Includes replies to Chisholm (1985b), Strawson (1985), Thalberg (1985), Vermazen (1985).

1985d ‘Replies to Essays X-XII’, in B. Vermazen and M. B. Hintikka, eds. (1985), pp. 242-52.

1986 ‘Knowing One’s Own Mind’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Association, 60, 441-58.

1987 ‘Problems in the Explanation of Action’, in P. Pettit, R. Sylvan, and J. Norman, eds., Metaphysics and Morality. Essays in Honor of J. J. C. Smart, Oxford and New York: Basil Blackwell, pp. 35-49.

Includes further thoughts on action description and explanation, emphasizing the fact that actions are often identified by referring to their consequences. On the identity thesis: "Suppose I thank someone [...] by telephoning and leaving a message on her answering machine [...] Although my telephoning and my thanking here were the same action, what I did can’t be described in both ways until long after the performance. In the same way, my great-great-grandfather in the paternal line could not have been described in just these terms during his lifetime, but that does not show he was not the same person as Clarence Herbert Davidson of Inverness" [p. 38]. Compare J. Bennett (1973). Much of the paper is a discussion of the idea that the intention is not part of the action, but a cause of it. Includes replies to Honderich (1982) and Føllesdal (1985).

The form which makes fully explicit the semantics of ‘Oedipus intentionally killed the reckless driver’ is more complex than suggested by Künne (1993). It is something like: ‘The contents of an intention of Oedipus’s is given by my next utterance. Oedipus killed the reckless driver’ [p. 23].

Ad Stoecker (1993): "My main reasons are semantical: I accept an ontology of events because that ontology provides the only account I find persuasive of the semantics of a large category of sentences and the entailment relations of those sentences. I do not think the lack of a perfectly general and useful criterion of event identity is any more serious for events than for objects; one only gets fairly solid criteria when one considers sorts: sorts of objects or sorts of events. States are another matter. Not only do we have no good idea how to individuate them, but, more important, there seems no clear semantic need to treat them as entities" [p. 288]. Further clarifications (in the spirit of 1985b, 1987) of the non-multiplying treatment of such puzzles as the-time-of-a-killing.

A clarification and a defense of the (1970b) identity theory of the mental and the physical ("anomalous monism"). See replies by Kim (1993c), McLaughlin (1993), and Sosa (1993).

1994 ‘Davidson, Donald’, in S. Guttenplan, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 231-36.

A self-profile, including an overview of the thesis that ‘"mental events are physical (which is not, of course, to say that they are not mental)" [p. 231].

Traces out some conceptual relations among the concepts of event, law, and object in an attempt to clarify and defend the claim that every true singular causal statement relating two events is backed by a law that covers those events when they are appropriately described.

Includes Ross (1972) and Kripke (1972) along with reprints of Fodor (1970a), Harman (1970), Parsons (1970).

1991 ‘Acts and Scenes’, in N. Cooper and P. Engel, eds., New Inquiries into Meaning and Truth, Hertfordshire: Harvester Wheatsheaf; New York: St. Martin’s Press, pp. 41-82.

A comparison of Davidson’s (1967a) theory of action sentences with the accounts of Barwise and Perry (1983) and B. Taylor (1985), with an application to the semantical analysis of perceptual reports. Includes new arguments in favor of Davidson against the predicate modifier view.

1996 ‘Philosophy of Language’, in N. Brunnin and E. P. Tsui-James, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 90-139.

Includes a section on semantic theories and metaphysics, with a discussion of event-based semantics and theories of adverbs [pp. 112-14].

1990 Representations of Common Sense Knowledge, San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

Chapter 5 (‘Time’) presents an account of temporal reasoning based on a representational system reifiying time-varying facts as "states" and "events", which in turn are subcategorized according to a type-token distinction.

1970 ‘Individuation of Actions’, The Journal of Philosophy, 67, 520-30; reprinted in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 351-61.

A mereological account, treating an act as a sequence or sum of events. "My pulling the trigger and my shooting the prisoner [are] two different acts, since they occupied different (though overlapping) stretches of time. There is a tendency to object that I was doing only one thing [...] but we can invoke the relation of ‘amounting to’ [...] I pulled the trigger, and this act amounted to--quickly became a case of, grew to be a case of--my shooting the prisoner" [p. 525].

1974 ‘Extensionality and Singular Causal Sentences’, Philosophical Studies, 25, 69-72.

1975 ‘Action’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, Suppl. Vol. 1, Part 2 ("New Essays in the Philosophy of Mind"), 129-44.

A systematic introductory text, presenting the main rival views on various topics selected for chapter-length treatment: the nature of action, the relation between actions and events, intention, explanation, and more. The book also presents Davis’s own theory of action--a version of the volitional theory: a doing of type K is an action iff a corresponding event of type K occurred as a result of a "volition" (roughly, a mental event "which is normally a cause of the agent’s belief that he is acting in a certain way, and which normally causes such doing-related events as to make it true that he is acting in that way" [p. 16]). Chapter 2, on "Actions and Events", includes a discussion of identity and individuation criteria, focusing mostly on "the prolific theory" (discussed in connection with Goldman), "the austere theory" (Davidson) and "the moderate theory" (a version of which is Davis’s 1970 mereological account).

1980 ‘Wayward Causal Chains’, in M. Bradie and M. Brand, eds. (1980), pp. 55-65.

Argues that some causal analyses of action can accommodate counterexamples involving wayward causal chains. "But I am not thereby trying to defend the causal theory of action [...] there are at least a half a dozen different concepts of interest to action theory for which causal or partly causal analyses seem appropriate, and the concept of action itself is not one of them. So the phrase ‘the causal theory of action’ is highly misleading" [p. 55]. Applications to the view that actions are volitions.

1994 ‘Action (1)’, in S. Guttenplan, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 111-17.

A survey of the main issues in the metaphysics of action, including their nature and individuation criteria.

"How can one admit, for the sake of a legal argument, the existence of such actions [in which responsibility is neither ascribed nor excused] and yet be understood to mean, not merely that the claim has yet to be proved, but that what occurred was not even an action?" [p. 94].

1979 ‘Perlocutions’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 3, 225-43; reprinted in J. R. Searle, F. Kiefer, and M. Bierwisch, eds., Speech Act Theory and Pragmatics, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1980, pp. 37-55.

Includes a discussion of identity and individuation criteria for speech acts [pp. 230-31]. See 1984 for a more extensive discussion. Includes also a brief discussion of the analysis of ‘kill’ as deriving from ‘cause to die’ (McCawley 1968 and Lakoff 1970).

1983 ‘Introduction’, in S. Davis, ed., Causal Theories of Mind. Action, Knowledge, Memory, Perception, and Reference, Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, pp. 1-41.

Section II (pp. 3-18) gives an extensive analysis of Goldman’s theory of action, focusing on his views on level-generation and the individuation of actions.

An application of a "multiplier" theory of events (in the spirit of Kim and Goldman) to illocutionary and perlocutionary acts. (See also the brief remarks in 1980.)

1980 ‘Swain’s Counterfactual Analysis of Causation’, Philosophical Studies, 38, 169-76.

1988 ‘Reasoning About Partially-Ordered Events’, Artificial Intelligence, 36, 375-99; reprinted in D. Weld and J. de Kleer, eds., Readings in Qualitative Reasoning About Physical Systems, San Mateo, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, 1990, pp. 382-93.

Examines a class of temporal reasoning problems involving events whose order is not completely known. The complexity of the problems with regard to various restricted classes of cause-and-effect relationships is also analysed.

1979 ‘On the Progressive and the "Imperfective Paradox"’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 3, 267-72.

Argues that there is no such linguistic problem as Dowty’s (1977) "imperfective paradox", and that the distinction between accomplishments and non-accomplishments is not necessarily that the former, but not the latter, involve the coming about of a result state.

1989 ‘Boundedness and the Structure of Situations’, Leuvense Bijdragen, 78, 275-308.

A criticism of van Voorst’s (1986) account of aspect as dependent on the spatial (rather than temporal) structure of actions, events, states, and processes (globally referred to as ‘situations’).

1991 ‘Voir un événement’ [‘To See an Event’, in French], in J.-L. Petit, ed. (1991), pp. 97-122.

Strarting from features of events that mark them out of facts, scrutinizes the role of perception in the individuation of events.

1992 ‘Indefinite Objects’, in R. Bok-Bennema and P. Coopmans, eds., Linguistics in the Netherlands, Dordrecht: Foris, pp. 91-100.

Individual-level predicates may have an eventuality argument (though the boundary between event and state reading is flexible).

Argues that a dynamic formulation of Discourse Representation Theory can account for the phenomenon of "existential disclosure" (= "the possibility of addressing (dynamic) existentially closed (implicit) arguments as if they were free variables" [p. 562]) characteristic of adverbial modification (understood as in Davidson 1967a).

1984 ‘Notes on Agentivity and Causation’, Studies in Language, 8, 181-213.

Argues that the semantic category of Agent must be described in terms of prototype feature representations which include volition as an important and generally sufficient, but not necessary, component.

1985 ‘Agentivity and Syntax’, in W. H. Eilfort, P. D. Kroeber, and K. L. Peterson, eds., CLS 21: Papers from the Twenty-First Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Part 2, Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, pp. 1-12.

Developments and applications of the (1984) view about the semantic category of Agent.

1990 ‘Ergativity and the Cognitive Model of Event Structure in Lhasa Tibetan’, Cognitive Linguistics, 1, 289-321.

Includes a discussion on how volition can be represented in complex event schemata used in the semantic characterization of case roles.

1991 ‘Event Construal and Case Role Assignment’, in L. A. Sutton, C. Johnson, and R. Shields, eds., (1991), pp. 338-53.

Aims at a minimalist, event-based account of the semantics of "a set of core case roles".

1992 ‘Temporal Reasoning with Abductive Event Calculus’, in B. Neumann, ed., Proceedings of the 10th European Conference on Artificial Intelligence (ECAI 92), Chichester: John Wiley & Sons, pp. 384-88.

Presents an abductive extension of the event calculus of Kowalski and Sergot (1986), with applications to various temporal reasoning problems.

Develops a unified ontology of objecthood, essences, and causation. Sections 2.1.2-2.1.3 discusses and rejects the view that events are the fundamental elements out of which all objects are construed. Chapter 8 on causation.

1968 ‘Features of Intentional Actions’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 29, 232-44.

Criticism of Anscombe’s argument (in 1957) to the effect that "an action is not called intentional in virtue of any extra feature which exists when it is performed".

1995 ‘On the Necessity of Distinguishing between (Un)boundedness and (A)telicity’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 18, 1-19.

"It is argued that two different types of concept are often intermingled in discussions of Aktionsart. The most common type of classification is one of situation types, relating to the potential actualisation of a situation, although some of the definitions have to do with the actual realization of the situation. This distinction, adequately captured by the notions of (a)telicity and (un)boundedness (Declerck 1989), is explored and it is shown how NPs, PPs and tense influence a sentence’s classification as (un)bounded." [Author’s abstract]

1989 ‘State, Event, Process, and Topology’, General Linguistics, 29, 159-200.

A topological account of the state-event-process trichotomy: states (characterized by absence of change or discontinuity) are represented by open intervals; events (which mark discontinuities against the static background) by closed intervals; and processes (which are changes from an initial state toward a final state) are represented by intervals closed on the left (beginning) but possibly open on the right (end). Discusses various properties of events thus defined (e.g., non-punctual events are bounded, commensurate with a duration); distinguishes different kinds of processes (e.g., completed vs. non-completed, progressive vs. non-progressive), and different kinds of states (permanent, contingent). Different meanings connected with the categories of tense and aspect are defined accordingly.

1990 ‘The Concepts of State, Process and Event in Linguistics’, Forum Linguisticum, 8.

Argues that the trichotomy state/process/event is basic and ontological, and cannot be reduced to a conceptual dichotomy like state/action.

1990 ‘Discourse Analysis of Aorist and Imperfect in Bulgarian and French’, in N. B. Thelin, ed., Verbal Aspect in Discourse, Contributions to the Semantics of Time and Temporal Perspective in Slavic and Non-Slavic Languages, Amsterdam and Philadelphia: John Benjamins, pp. 237-61.

It is claimed that Bulgarian provides a counterexample to the view (defended e.g. by Mourelatos 1981) that the perfective denotes events while the imperfective denotes states and processes.

1995 ‘Is the Notion of Process Necessary?’, in P. M. Bertinetto, V. Bianchi, J. Higginbotham, and M. Squartini, eds. (1995), pp. 55-70.

Argues that it is essential to take the trichotomy state/event/process as basic when analysing aspectual constructions in natural language. In particular, the notion of process cannot be derived from those of state and event, even if it is closely related to them.

1990 ‘Non-Quantificational Readings of Adverbs’, in M. Stokhof and L. Torenvliet, eds., Proceedings of the 7th Amsterdam Colloquium, Amsterdam: ITLI, pp. 509-28.

Argues that in additional to event-based quantificational readings (see 1993), adverbs such as ‘often’ and ‘sometimes’ also admit of non-quantificational readings.

1993 Adverbs of Quantification: A Generalized Quantifier Approach, New York: Garland.

An investigation into the semantics of adverbs of quantification such as ‘always’ and ‘sometimes’. The proposed account treats them as generalized quantifiers, rather than modifiers--specifically, as expressions that establish relations between sets of eventualities (= states, processes, or events). Contains extensive review of the relevant literature, including connections with Reichenbach’s and Davidson’s work.

1996 ‘(In)definites and Generality’, in M. Kanazawa, C. Piñón, and H. de Swart, eds., Quantifiers, Deduction, and Context, Stanford: CSLI Lecture Notes No. 57, pp. 171-94.

"An analysis of adverbs of quantification as generalized quantifiers over events combined with an interpretation of indefinite NPs as dynamic existential quantifiers and of definite NPs as context-dependent quantifiers yields the right interpretation of generic sentences" [p. 171].

1976 ‘Conceptual Connection and Causal Relation’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 54, 3-13.

1994 ‘Verbal Semantics in Functional Grammar’, in C. Bache, H. Basbøll, and C.-E. Lindberg, eds. (1994), pp. 23-42.

Includes a brief typological analysis of the notion of "state of affairs", understood as a general term covering both situations (positions and states, which are static) and events (actions and processes, which are dynamic).

1990 ‘Perspectives on van Voorst’s Theory of Event Structure’, Papers and Studies in Contrastive Linguistics, 26, 167-86.

1992 ‘La forme logique des phrases adverbiales et la nature des événements’ [‘The Logical Form of Adverbial Phrases and the Nature of Events’, in French], Lingua e Stile, 27, 183-98.

"The choice of a particular logical form can have non-trivial consequences upon our ontological choices concerning event identity; on the other hand, metaphysical theses on the nature of events may constrain the logical form appropriate to the sentences describing them" [p. 198]. The correct theory lies in a "reflective equilibrium" between metaphysical principles and semantical constraints. Reviews the work of Davidson (1967a), Higginbotham (1983, 1985), T. Parsons (1985), Dowty (1979).

1977 ‘Chisholm’s Theory of Agency’, The Journal of Philosophy, 74, 692-703.

A discussion of various issues including Chisholm’s notion of events as states of affairs and the resulting account of agent causation.

1979 ‘Chisholm’s Theory of Agency’, Grazer philosophische Studien, 7/8 [special issue "Essays in the Philosophy of R. M. Chisholm", also published as E. Sosa, ed. (1979)], 215-29.

1987 Choice. The Essential Element in Human Action, London and New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

1967 ‘Reasons and Causes’, in P. Edwards, ed. in chief, The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, New York: Macmillan and Free Press, Vol. 7, pp. 85-88.

A compact survey of the main positions concerning the view that reasons are causes.

Commenting on Cody (1967a), points out that the claim that the claim that an action cannot have many descriptions is parallel to the claim that there are not many true descriptions of material objects. Since the latter is false, the former must also be false.

1972a Studies in the Logic of Verb Aspect and Time Reference in English, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Texas at Austin.

1972b ‘On the Syntax and Semantics of the Atomic Predicate cause’, in P. M. Peranteau, J. N. Levi, and G. C. Phares, eds., Papers from the Eighth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, pp. 62-74.

Argues that the atomic predicate cause always takes a sentential subject rather than an individual (contra McCawley’s 1973a). The semantic analysis is given in terms of counterfactuals (independently of D. K. Lewis 1973).

1975 ‘The Stative in the Progressive and Other Essence/Accident Contrasts’, Linguistic Inquiry, 6, 579-88.

Some remarks on the semantic characterization of agency and of the distinction between stative/nonstative verbs, and on the more subtle subcategorizations that only superficially appears to be captured by that distinction.

1977 ‘Toward a Semantic Analysis of Verb Aspect and the English "Imperfective" Progressive’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 1, 45-77.

A discussion of the "imperfective paradox" (concerning e.g. the oddity of sentences such as ‘The rains are destroying the crops, but perhaps they will stop before the crops are destroyed’) which revises Dowty (1972a).

1979 Word Meaning and Montague Grammar. The Semantics of Verbs and Times in Generative Semantics and Montague’s PTQ, Reidel: Dordrecht.

Gives an account of progressive that makes a progressive sentence true at a given time t iff the corresponding non-progressive sentence is true at all "inertia worlds", i.e., possible worlds which are exactly like the actual world up to t and "in which the future course of events after this time develops in a way most compatible with the past course of events" [p. 148].

1982 ‘Tenses, Time Adverbs, and Compositional Semantic Theory’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 5 [Special Issue on "The Semantics of Temporal Elements", R. Wall and R. E. Grandy, eds.], 23-55.

1986 ‘The Effects of Aspectual Class on the Temporal Structure of Discourse: Semantics or Pragmatics?’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 9 [Special Issue on "Tense and Aspect in Discourse", D. R. Dowty, ed.], 37-61.

"We do not understand the perceived temporal ordering of discourse simply by virtue of the times that the discourse asserts events to occur or states to obtain, but rather also in terms of the additional larger intervals where we sometimes assume them to occur and obtain" [p. 59].

1989 ‘On the Semantic Content of the Notion of "Thematic Role"’, in G. Chierchia, B. H. Partee, and R. Turner, eds., Properties, Types and Meaning, Volume II: Semantic Issues, Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 69-129.

A discussion of the formal foundations of a theory of thematic roles (agent, patient, goal, etc.). Section 3 develops a "neo-Davidsonian system" based on Davidson’s (1967a) theory of adverbs in action sentences. The proposal is that "to construct a thematic role system, we should stipulate that not only the modifiers but also the arguments of verbs are actually predicates of events; more precisely, thematic roles are relations between individuals and events" [p. 83]. For instance, a sentence like Jones buttered the toast at midnight is analysed as ($e)[Buttered(e) & Agent(Jones, e) & Patient(the-toast, e) & at-midnight (e)]. Compare Parsons (1980) and Carlson (1984).

1991 ‘Thematic Proto-Roles and Argument Selection’, Language, 67, 547-619.

Argues that traditional role types are not discrete categories, but cluster concepts, only two of which are needed: "Proto-Agent" and "Proto-Patient". Includes a defense of the view that "the familiar way in which the aspect of telic predicates (or accomplishments and achievements) depends on their NP arguments (Verkuyl 1972, Dowty 1979) can be captured formally by the principle that the meaning of a telic predicate is a homomorphism from its (structured) Theme argument denotations into a (structured) domain of events, modulo its other arguments" [p. 367]. Compare also Krifka (1989a).

1993 ‘Excalibur: A Program for Planning and Reasoning with Processes’, Artificial Intelligence, 62, 1-40.

On a planner designed to interact with a constantly changing world. The knowledge base involves a distinction between processes, actions, and facts: "Events represent change, and events can be actions or processes. An action event [e.g., "open the door"] is an event caused by an agent and has a known duration. A process event [e.g., "water flows"] is self-sustaining and may be infinite in duration [...] A fact [e.g., "the door is open"] describes the results or preconditions of an event" [p. 17].

1962 ‘Must Effects Have Causes?’, in R. J. Butler, ed., Analytical Philosophy, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 20-21.

A criticism of Vendler (1962a), contending that "causes, too, can be events and processes" [p. 24]. Rejoinder in Vendler (1962b).

1961 ‘Particulars and the Relational Theory of Time’, The Philosophical Review, 70, 447-69.

On the possibility of reformulating temporal statements in a tense-free language in which temporal determination is expressed by relations among particulars. Concludes that this would make space and time a mere difference between the relations which particulars exemplify, while there is in fact a difference in the sorts of entities that exemplify those relations.

A criticism of Mayo (1961). Conclusion: "We use time (along with the objects to which the events happen) in our individuation and reidentification of events. We cannot "revisit" the same event because the notion of a "revisit" and the notion of "the same event" are, within our conceptual system, mutually incompatible. The notion of a revisit carries with it the implication of temporal succession, and temporal succession is one of our criteria for marking off, when necessary, the emergence of new events" [p. 98].

1967 ‘Can Events Move?’, Mind, 76, 479-92; reprinted in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 415-28.

In order for an entity x to move, it has to be wholly at one place and then wholly at another place. But an event is never wholly at two different places (at most, some phases of the event occur at some place, other phases at other places). Therefore, events cannot move.

Section 4.3 on "Events and States": "That the book is tattered is [...] a fact; the tattered condition of the book is a state". "When there is an alteration in a state, we have an occurrence or a happening. We sometimes speak of the occurrence or happening as an event, although it seems that this latter term is reserved for those occurrences which are particularly significant to those who are describing it [...] Roughly speaking, we can say that an event is a change of some sort; it is constituted by a succession of different states" [pp. 163-64].

1977 ‘Referring to Events’, in P. A. French, T. Uehling, and H. K. Wettstein, eds., Studies in the Philosophy of Language (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. II), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 90-99; reprinted in P. A. French, T. Uehling, and H. K. Wettstein, eds., Contemporary Perspectives in the Philosophy of Language, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1979 [revised and enlarged edition of the 1977 volume], pp. 369-78.

Argues that the causal relata are not events but "facets or features of events themselves" [p. 375]. Compare Achinstein (1975a, 1979). More discussion in Kim (1977), Boër (1979), Sanford (1985), Ehring (1987) inter alia.

1988 Explaining Behavior. Reasons in a World of Causes, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press/Bradford Books.

"I do not think a cause of X is the same thing as a causing of X. The former is typically over before X occurs; the latter cannot exist until X occurs" [p. 18, fn. 11].

Argues that if reasons are explanatorily relevant to behavior, they cannot simply be causes of behavior: their content must be a causally relevant property.

1990 ‘Does Meaning Matter?’, in E. Villanueva, ed., Information, Semantics, and Epistemology, Cambridge, MA: Basil Blackwell, pp. 5-17; reprinted in C. A. Macdonald and G. Macdonald, eds. (1995), pp. 107-20.

Argues that although meaning does not supervene on the intrinsic physical properties of an event (and is therefore screened off from explanations of the event’s effects), nevertheless meaning can figure in the explanation of behavior, i.e., in the explanation of the event’s causing its effect.

1993 ‘Mental Events as Structuring Causes of Behavior’, in J. Heil and A. R. Mele, eds. (1993), pp. 121-36.

Refines the distinction between triggering and structuring causes introduced in (1988) and argues that mental events can be viewed as playing a structuring causal role in the behavior, explanation of behavior.

1995 ‘Reply: Causal Relevance and Explanatory Exclusion’, in C. A. Macdonald and G. Macdonald, eds. (1995), pp. 142-51.

Reply to Kim (1990) criticisms of Dretske (1990). The problem of how mental content can explain something that is already explained by physical facts (the "explanatory exclusion" problem) is to be solved by identifying "content" with the relational (physical) facts that constitute it (or on which content supervenes).

Causal judgments can be empirically verified and do not involve postulation of unobservable ties between events. Causality is "a relation between two concrete, individual events and a set of concrete circumstances: the definition of the relation does not employ the notion of collections or kinds of events" [p. 118]. Views already put forward in (1924, 1926) (see infra, Appendix). An event is either a change or an unchange in a state of affairs.

1960 ‘In Defense of Dualism’, in S. Hook, ed., Dimensions of Mind, New York: New York University Press, pp. 85-90.

"The causality relation [...] does not presuppose at all that its cause-term and its effect-term both belong to the same ontological category, but only that both of them be events" [p. 88].

Argues that the concept of an event is central and forms the basis for Dewey’s concept of an object.

1960 ‘A Defense of ’s Proof of the Unreality of Time’, The Philosophical Review, 69, 497-504; reprinted in M. Dummett, Truth and Other Enigmas, London: Duckworth, 1978, pp. 351-57; also in J. Westphal and C. Levenson, eds., Time, Indianapolis and Cambridge: Hackett, 1993, pp. 112-18.

"To say that time is unreal is to say that we apprehend relations between events or properties of objects as temporal when they are not temporal at all. We have therefore to conceive of these events or objects as standing to one another in some non-temporal relation which we mistake for the temporal one" [p. 117].

1990 ‘Eventualities in a Natural Language System’, in K. Bläsius, U. Hedstück, and C. Rollinger, eds., Sorts and Types for Artificial Intelligence (Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence, 418), Berlin and Heidelberg: Springer-Verlag, pp. 209-39.

On representing "eventualities" (in the sense of E. Bach 1986a) in a formal language with sorted domains. It is argued that the representation of structured sets of eventualities ("individualities can be partitioned into subevents, and be grouped together to form episodes", p. 209) is needed to deal with certain plural phenomena without resorting to second order variables.

1991 Ereignisse: Ihre Logik und Ontologie aus textsemantischer Sicht [Events: Their Logic and Ontology from the Viewpoint of Text Semantics, in German], Doctoral Dissertation, University of Stuttgart.

1995 ‘The Intergressive as a New Category of Verbal Aktionsart’, Journal of Semantics, 12, 311-56.

On classifying such eventive predicates as "coughed", "played a sonata", or "sang for five hours", which pose problems for certain accounts of Aktionsarten insofar as they do not introduce any change of state.

Argues in defense of the view that agency can be explained in terms of causality.

Gives an account of causation to the effect that event e causes event e' if and only if there are some events (conditions) which are causally connected to e' but not to e [p. 770]. Criticism in Bassham (1986).

Argues that Dretske’s (1977) account of the causal relata as features of events runs into trouble in causal contexts involving "higher order" emphasis.

1995 ‘Causes and Nested Counterfactuals’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 73, 574-78.

1976 ‘Individuating Actions: A Reply to McCullagh’s "The Individuation of Actions and Acts" and Thalberg’s "When Do Causes Take Effect?"’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 55, 209-12.

Chapter 3, on ‘Events and Non-events’, sides with Davidson’s account versus Kim’s: events must be characterized as "something happening to something, and not just exemplifiying its constitutive property" [p. 21]. Chapter 4 is on ‘Event Causation’.

1995 ‘Nonreducible Supervenient Causation’, in E. E. Savellos and Ü. D. Yalin, eds. (1995), pp. 168-86.

Includes a discussion of the question: which properties of event-cause e are causally relevant to the occurrence of event-effect e' ?

1994 ‘Coarsening Brand on Events, while Proliferating Davidsonian Events’, Grazer philosophische Studien, 47, 155-83.

"A coarse-grained theory of event individuation is defended by arguing that events are spatio-temporal particulars with an ontological affinity to coarse-grained physical objects and by demonstrating that the metalinguistic correlate to one set of adequate identity conditions for events is most plausibly interpreted as coarsely individuating events. Such coarse-grained events [...] admit of divisibility proliferation, much like the proliferation of physical objects entailed by Goodman’s calculus of individuals. This [...] is then used to resolve Davidson’s paradox concerning the poisoned space traveller who is killed long before he dies" [Author’s abstract].

1986 ‘Structure sémantique et forme logique d’après l’analyse aristotélicienne des phrases d’action’ [‘Semantic Structure and Logical Form According to the Aristotelian Analysis of Action Sentences’, in French], in H. Joly, ed. Philosophie du langage et grammaire dans l’antiquité, Bruxelles: OUSIA; Grenoble: Université des Sciences Sociales, pp. 181-202.

An analysis of Aristotle’s distinction between energeia and kinêsis and of its bearing on modern accounts of the distinction between activity and accomplishment verbs.

1991 ‘Adverbes, événements et structure sémantique’ [‘Adverbs, Events, and Semantic Structure’, in French], in J.-L. Petit, ed. (1991), pp. 229-49.

"For adverbs, treated as predicates of events by classical semantics (Davidson), other authors have preferred a treatment with predicate modifiers in an intensional semantic context with desired fidelity to grammatical intuition. The equivalence of all those theories from the point of view of their descriptive adequacy tends to show that semantic structure in language has no marked preference for an ontology of events and therefore this option implies a metaphysical involvement." [Abstract, on p. 286].

1982 ‘Quelques remarques sur la logique des phrases d’action’[‘Some Remarks on the Logic of Action Sentences’, in French], Logique et Analyse, 99, 291-319.

An analysis of the logical form of action sentences as a paradigm case study for a comparison between extensionalist (à la Davidson) and intensionalist (à la Montague) programs in semantics. Argues that "the choice of an ontology belongs to the definition of the language which describes, not to that of the described language" [p. 316]. Includes critical discussion of T. Parsons (1970), Borowski (1974), Cresswell (1974).

1986 ‘L’anomalie du mental’ [‘The Anomaly of the Mental’, in French], Critique, 474, 1125-40.

1967 ‘States, Activities and Performances’, Australasian Journal of Philosophy, 45, 292-308.

A useful introduction to Davidson’s views, from the conception of events as particulars to the treatment of agency, causality, and mental events [pp. 25-67]. The Appendix [pp. 180-82] gives a terse presentation of the "slingshot" argument in causal contexts (Davidson 1967c).

1986/7 Review of Vermazen and Hintikka, eds. (1985), Theoria (Spain), 2, 214-17.

Argues that situations in which "a certain event occurs at a given time and place, and later another event occurs, perhaps at a different place, and there is no common individual involved in the description of the events" run afoul of the "covering-law" model of explanation.

Takes events, construed as property exemplifications, as relata of the causal relation. (Property exemplifications are understood as a "special combination" of a particular and a universal.) Includes a discussion of the "slingshot" argument and detailed criticism of Davidson’s (1969a) identity criteria for events. Most relevant material is in Chapter 2, "An Ontological Analysis of Causation".

1990b Critical Notice of Tooley (1988), Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 50, 605-10.

1984 A Study of Davidsonian Events, Doctoral Dissertation, University of California at Irvine; revised version published with the same title, Nankang (Taipei): Institute of American Culture, Academia Sinica, 1985.

Includes a defense of Davidson’s identity claims against the time-of-a-killing problem (criticisms of Thomson 1971a and Thalberg 1971a inter alia). Final chapter on the notion of causally necessary condition, focusing on the assumption that the causal ancestry of an individual event is not essential to that event. (The assumption is argued to underlie, but also to be in conflict with, J. L. Mackie’s account).

1994 ‘Introduction’, in J. Faye, U. Scheffler, and M. Urchs, eds., Logic and Causal Reasoning, Berlin: Akademie Verlag, pp. 1-25.

A critical survey of the literature on the logic of causal reasoning, focusing on theories that analyse singular causal statements in terms of sentential causal connectives.

1965 ‘Action and Responsibility’, in M. Black, ed., Philosophy in America, Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, pp. 134-60; reprinted in A. R. White, ed. (1968), pp. 95-119.

Argues that "we can, if we wish, puff out an action to include an effect" and call the expansion itself an action [p. 146]. An action can be "squeezed down to a minimum or else stretched out" by the accordion effect. See Atwell (1969) and Strasser (1987) for criticisms.

1980 ‘Identity, Necessity, and Events’, in N. Block, ed., Readings in Philosophy of Psychology. Volume One, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, pp. 148-55.

Argues that Kripke’s (1972) argument against the mind-body identity theory does not apply if the theory is construed as a theory about "concrete" events in Davidson’s sense.

Argues that Thalberg (1978a) "has given no good reason to think that Chisholm’s theory is not an effective event-language reduction [i.e., a reduction of event language to states of affairs language] or that a variation on the Kim-Goldman property exemplification theory is not an adequate event-reduction theory [i.e., a reduction of events to a species of some other, more familiar, kind of entity]" [p. 16]. Reply in Thalberg (1980a).

1975 ‘On The Historical Explanation of Unique Events’, Theory and Decision, 6, 87-97.

On the dispute between the philosopher’s conception of an event as of something unique and yet explainable insofar as it happens to be one "of a certain kind" versus the historian’s emphasis on the particularity of every individual event and on the possibility that it be the only one of its "kind".

"Since an occasion sentence is a sentence that is true on some occasion and false on others, while events [...] occur on some occasions (but not on others) [...] an eternal sentence is an event description if and only if that sentence itself is the eternal form of an occasion sentence, i.e., occasion sentences are the basic elements of language for the description of events" (an eternal sentence being one whose truth value does not change upon time or speaker) [p. 403].

1963 ‘Mental Events and the Brain’, The Journal of Philosophy, 60, 295-96; reprinted in D. M. Rosenthal, ed., The Nature of Mind, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991, pp. 266-67.

A criticism of the identity hypothesis concerning mental events and brain processes (if formulated as "X is a mental process of kind A = X is a central process of kind a").

1982 ‘Acts, Events and Things’, in W. Leinfellner, E. Kraemer, and J. Schank, eds., Language and Ontology. Proceedings of the 6th International Wittgenstein Symposium, Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, pp. 97-105.

"What is the relation between an act and the underlying bodily movement, an event and the underlying occurrences, a material thing and its matter? [...] Given an object and any description satisfied by the object, I say there is a new entity, the object under the description, that results from combining the object with the description. The relation between the different pairs of entities is then roughly that of an object to an object under a description. Such an answer solves puzzles and reveals uniformities that cannot otherwise be readily accounted for" [Author’s abstract].

Elaborates on the theory of causal action: some instances of causation involve objects and agents.

1967 ‘A Defence of the Principle of Event Causality’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 18, 89-108.

Argues that the principle that every event has a cause is not subject to attack from quantum theory.

1990 Tense and Narrativity. From Medieval Performance to Modern Fiction, Austin: University of Texas Press.

Events as the most basic "among the cognitive structures we use to map experience onto language", and the ones "the most closely involved with the categories of tense and aspect" [p. 97]. They are not part of reality, but "a hermeneutic construct for converting an undifferentiated continuum of the raw data of experience, or of the imagination, into the verbal structures we use to talk about experience: narratives, stories" [p. 99].

1979 A Dictionary of Philosophy, London: Pan Books; Revised Second Edition, New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1984.

Event: "An occurrence (as opposed to a material object), usually thought of as happening at a determinable time and place. It need not involve the participation of human agents. It is often conceived as subsisting with other events in causal relationships; one event may be said to cause another to occur, as its effect" [p. 115]. See also Action, p. 4; Causation, p. 58.

1970a ‘Troubles about Actions’, Synthese, 21, 298-319; reprinted in D. Davidson and G. Harman, eds. (1972), pp. 48-69.

Argues that "Davidson’s theory of action sentences provides no natural account of distinctions like the one between ["John spoke clearly"] and ["John spoke, clearly" or "Clearly, John spoke"]; in particular, that Davidson’s theory provides for no natural treatment of those adverbs which are constituent modifiers rather than sentence modifiers" [p. 57]. Compare Wierenga’s (1980) discussion.

1970b ‘Three Reasons for Not Deriving "Kill" from "Cause to Die"’, Linguistic Inquiry, 1, 429-38.

A criticism of the view that causative verbs such as ‘kill’ are transformationally derived from ‘cause to die’ (compare Lakoff 1970). Reason one: ‘John caused Mary to die and it surprised me that she did so’ becomes ill-formed upon substitution of ‘caused Mary to die’ with ‘killed Mary’. Reason two: ‘John caused Bill to die on Sunday by stabbing him on Saturday’ becomes unacceptable upon substitution. Reason three: ‘John caused Bill to die by swallowing his tongue’ is ambiguous, but it becomes unambiguous upon substitution.

1974 ‘The Special Sciences (Or: The Disunity of Science as a Working Hypothesis)’, Synthese, 28, 97-115.

Statement of the doctrine of "token physicalism", according to which any event falling under any scientific law also falls under a physical law, and is therefore a physical event (whence it putatively follows that physics subsumes the special sciences). See Horgan (1981a) for criticisms.

1965 ‘Quantification into Causal Contexts’, in R. S. Cohen and M. W. Wartofsky, eds., Boston Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. 2: In Honor of Philipp Frank, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 263-74.

Contains a classic formulation of the "slingshot" argument for causal contexts (parallel to Quine’s 1953 slingshot for modal contexts. Compare Davidson’s formulation in 1967c). Includes remarks on Burks (1951).

1966 ‘A Model-Theoretic Approach to Causal Logic’, Det Kongeliger Norske Videnskabers Selskabs Forhandlinger, 2, 3-13.

Gives a possible worlds semantics for a quantified modal logic with causality connectives in the spirit of Burks (1951).

1979 ‘Handlungen, ihre Gründe und Ursachen’ [‘Actions, Their Reasons and Causes’, in German], in Lenk, ed. (1979), Vol. 2/2, pp. 431-44.

A critical analysis of Davidson’s (1963) argument to the effect that the causes of actions are the reasons for acting.

1980 ‘Explanation of Action’, in R. Hilpinen, ed., Rationality in Science, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 231-47.

Includes a criticism of Davidson’s (1963) account of the notions of causation and explanation; further developments in (1985).

1983 ‘Situation Semantics and the "Slingshot" Argument’, Erkenntnis, 19, 91-98.

Focusing on the relevant treatment of singular terms, argues that "slingshot" arguments such as Quine’s (1953) "do not vitiate situation semantics or quantification into non-extensional contexts" [p. 97].

1985 ‘Causation and Explanation: A Problem in Davidson’s view on Action and Mind’, in E. LePore and B. P. McLaughlin, eds. (1985), pp. 311-23.

A criticism of Davidson’s account of the notions of causation and explanation, and of their interrelation. Focuses on Davidson’s use of physical laws in the explanation of actions on the connection between action explanation and his arguments for the token-identity of the mental and the physical.

Ch. 8 ("Substances, Properties and Events") treats events as dated, unrepeatable occurrences occupying definite intervals of time. More precisely, "an event consists in a triple of (i) a set of objects; (ii) types of changes of properties for each object in the set; and (iii) an interval of time [...] We say that a triple constitutes an event, rather than is identical to it, to leave it open that one and the same event may be constituted by different triples in different worlds" [p. 205-6]. Includes a criticism of Lombard’s (1981, 1982a) essentialism: "Lombard has done no more than isolate three features of events [...] and attribute to the event the transwordly identity conditions of the set of those features" [p. 212]. Lombard’s reply in (1986, ch. VII).

1993 ‘Time, Events, and Modality’, in R. Le Poidevin and M. Mac Beath, eds. (1993), pp. 80-95.

Discussion of the Leibnizian thesis that "facts about when events occur supervene on facts about ‘the successive order of things’". It is argued that to accommodate the possibility of changeless time (see Shoemaker 1969) while retaining the idea of a relationist construction of time from events, "the basis of the construction of the time-series of a world has to be expanded to allow facts about goings-on in other worlds to play a role" [p. 85]. Thus a way of construing a time-series for a world w out of temporal relations among events in worlds branching from w is proposed.

1994 Modern Logic. A Text in Elementary Symbolic Logic, New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press.

An example of how Davidson’s (1967a) analysis of action sentences can make its way into standard logic textbooks [pp. 288-89].

1967 ‘La philosophie de l’action de J. L. Austin’ [‘The Philosophy of Action of J. L. Austin’, in French], Archives de Philosophie, 30, 36-60.

1984 ‘Gentle Murder, or the Adverbial Samaritan’, The Journal of Philosophy, 81, 193-96.

On the unacceptable deontic implication from "x murders" to "x is legally obliged to do so". See Sinnot-Armstrong (1985) and Clark (1986b).

1991 The Immaterial Self. A Defence of the Cartesian Dualist Conception of the Mind, London and New York: Routledge.

Includes an examination--from a dualist perspective--of the topic of psychophysical causation [Chapter 6, pp. 158-201]. Against Davidson’s (1970b) argument for anomalous monism, objects that "whatever case he may be able to construct for each of the premises individually, he is not entitled to assert their conjunction" [p. 185].

1994 ‘The Token-identity Thesis’ in Warner and Szubka, eds. (1994), pp. 299-310.

1986 Noncausal Connections and the Nature of Events, Doctoral Dissertation, Wayne State University.

Argues (against Kim and Goldman) that there is no reason to posit noncausal determinative relations among events.

1992 ‘"How Not to Flip the Switch With the Floodlight": Causative-Inchoatives, the Instrumental "With", and the Identity of Actions’, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly, 73, 31-43.

1983 ‘On the Perspectival Ordering of Patient and Causing Event in the Distribution of French and German Verbs of Change: A Contrastive Study’, in R. Bäuerle, C. Schwartze, and A. von Stechow, eds., Meaning, Use, and Interpretation of Language, Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, pp. 121-33.

On the speaker’s perspectival choices in ordering syntactically and syntagmatically the patient of a verb of change and the event causing the change referred to by the verb.

1985 ‘Aktionsart, Aspekt und Zeitkonstitution’ [‘Aktionsart, Aspect, and Temporal Constitution’, in German], in C. Schwartze and D. Wunderlich, eds., Handbuch der Lexikologie, Kronberg: Athenaeum, pp. 229-49.

Includes an examination of the telic-atelic (activity-accomplishment) distinction.

1993 ‘Tense and Aspect: A Mereological Approach’, in Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-93), Vol. 2, Chambéry: IJCAI [Morgan Kaufmann], pp. 1222-28.

A framework for dealing with tense and aspect phenomena, based on the view that verbal morphology plays a crucial role in specifying the temporal meaning of a sentence. For the purposes of semantic representation, the domain of events is modelled within a basic, non-extensional mereological framework, allowing for a representation of habituals and of perfective and imperfective events by means of plural quantifiers ranging on collections of events.

1994 ‘A Mereological Characterization of Temporal and Aspectual Phenomena’, in C. Martín-Vide, ed., Current Issues in Mathematical Linguistics, Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp. 269-78.

1986 ‘Mutual Causation, Simultaneity, and Event Description’, Philosophical Studies, 49, 361-72.

Argues against the idea of mutual causation (as in the case of two cards leaning against each other to form a card house) and suggests that dubious cases occur as a result of incomplete event descriptions.

1978 ‘The Problem of Action’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 15, 157-62.

1970 ‘Some Remarks on the Action Nominalization in English’, in R. A. Jacobs and P. S. Rosenbaum, eds., Readings in English Transformational Grammar, Waltham, MA: Ginn and Co., pp. 83-98.

Puts forward a transformationalist account of action nominalizations. Contrast Chomsky (1970) and Newmeyer (1970).

Includes Grünbaum (1971) and reprints of Gale (1969), Garson (1969), and Hamblin (1969).

1979 Studies in Metaphysics (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. IV), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Includes Achinstein (1979), Burge (1979), Kim (1979b), Lombard (1979b), Rosenberg and Martin (1979), and Shoemaker (1979).

1984 Causation and Causal Theories (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. IX), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Includes Collins (1984), Kim (1984a), Lycan (1984a), Shwayder (1984), Sosa (1984), and Vendler (1984a).

1979 ‘An Intensional Logic of Predicates’, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 20, 811-22.

Expands Clark’s (1970) account of predicate modifiers (a) by allowing predicates to be defined for every sentence; (b) by incorporating adverbial prepositional phrases. Gives also a consistent and complete set of rules of inferences, showing that the system is "adequate to all tasks of the predicate calculus". "The semantics of the logical constants corresponding to those of the predicate calculus will be seen as a special case of the semantics of modifiers. Thus the disadvantage of a requirement of new rules of inference will be to some extent offset by the twin advantages of ontological simplicity and a deeper theory of the nature of sentential operations" [p. 812].

1980 ‘Verbs, Events and the Flow of Time’, in C. Rohrer, ed. (1980), pp. 59-84.

A formal account of the complex system of tense, aspect, and temporal modifiers that makes "the variety of temporal reference" possible in a language like English. The underlying ontology includes states, events, and processes: "A state is an instantiation of a temporal property P of a thing x [...] holding over a certain duration of time [...] without any gaps or interruptions"; events can be instantaneous, and "among events with duration we distinguish mere events from processes on the ground that processes are made up of a series of changes that culminate in a state" [p. 63].

1996 ‘From Conceptual Time to Linguistic Time’, Computational Linguistics, 22, 91-127.

On the mapping between conceptual time, as it is perceived in the world, and linguistic time, which refers to how time is expressed in language. Includes a discussion of the advantages of taking events as entities "rather than making them subordinate to temporal intervals or points" [p. 95].

Argues that temporal distinctions are objective: events could be past, present or future and change with respect to these distinctions even in a world without perceivers or language-users. See (1969) for refinements and Garson (1969) for a criticism.

1969 ‘"Here" and "Now"’, The Monist, 53, 396-409; reprinted in E. Freeman and W. Sellars, eds. (1971), pp. 72-85.

There are deep dissimilarities between ‘here’ and ‘now’, showing that space and time are "radically different". In the course of the argument, it is argued that sortal events are not the temporal analogues of sortal objects, for a sortal event is both temporal and spatial.

1967 The Philosophy of Time: A Collection of Essays, Garden City, NY: Anchor Books.

A collection of classic and recent works, including reprints of Smart (1955) and D. C. Williams (1951).

From Tense Logic to Event Logic: moving from the need to formalize the aspectual character of verbs, exploits "the distinction between states (which are inherently imperfective) and events (which are inherently perfective)" [p. 4]. Informally: "to explain why only states, and not events, can be attributed to the present, we may remark that since an event in general takes time, it cannot ever be wholly present at one time; while a state, although it may endure over a stretch of time, does not change during such a stretch and so is present at each moment of the stretch" [p. 15]. In any case, "the distinction between states and events is not a distinction inherent in what goes on, but rather a distinction between two different ways we have of describing it" [p. 24].

Syntax and semantics (including completeness results) of the logic of the aspect operators Perf, Prog, and Pros expressing the occurrence of events in time. Roughly: PerfE is true now if some occurrence of the event denoted by ‘E’ is wholly in the past; ProsE is true now if some occurrence of E is wholly in the future; and ProgE is true now if some occurrence of E is partly in the past, partly present, and partly in the future.

1987b ‘Temporal Logic and Computer Science: An Overview’, in A. P. Galton, ed. (1987), pp. 1-52.

An extensive and wide-ranging overview, with an eye for connections with the linguistic and philosophical literature on time, actions, and events.

1990 ‘A Critical Examination of Allen’s Theory of Action and Time’, Artificial Intelligence, 42, 159-88.

Modifies the temporal ontology underlying J. F. Allen’s (1984) temporal logic by introducing instants in addition to intervals. The range of predicates for asserting temporal locations is diversified accordingly: both holds and occurs are split into three predicates holds-on, holds-in, holds-at and occurs-on, occurs-in, occurs-at. In both cases, the third predicate makes it possible to talk about instantaneous events. However, it is argued that a separate category of processes--in addition to properties and events--is not necessary.

1991 ‘Reified Temporal Theories and How to Unreify Them’, in Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-91), Vol. 2, Sydney: IJCAI [Morgan Kaufmann], pp. 1177-82.

Argues that reification of propositions expressing states and events as a means of handling temporal reasoning is both philosophically suspect and technically unnecessary. As an illustration, indicates how the reified theories of J. F. Allen (1984) and Shoham (1986, 1988) can be unreified. The resulting "loss of expressive power" can be rectified by adopting Davidson’s (1967a) theory in which event tokens, rather than types, are reified: the procedure is illustrated by means of Kowalski and Sergot’s (1986) event calculus. A general procedure for converting type-reification to token-reification is also proposed.

1993 ‘Towards an Integrated Logic of Space, Time, and Motion’, in Proceedings of the 13th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-93), Vol. 2, Chambéry: IJCAI [Morgan Kaufmann], pp. 1550-55.

Argues that J. F. Allen’s (1984) temporal logic, with the modifications suggested by Galton (1990), can be combined with a spatial logic to yield "a useful framework for reasoning about the motion of a rigid body in space" [p. 1550]. The notion of perturbation and the distinction between states of position and states of motion are introduced to provide a qualitative account of continuity, and the resulting system is shown to enable various types of events to be defined in terms of their conditions of occurrence, i.e., of the elementary positional relations on bodies and regions.

1994 ‘Instantaneous Events’, in H. J. Ohlbach, ed., Temporal Logic: Proceedings of the ICTL Workshop, Saarbrücken: Max-Planck-Institut für Informatik, Technical Report MPI-I-94-230, pp. 4-11.

Distinguishes strictly "instantaneous" events (with zero duration) from "momentary" events (with a positive--but in some sense minimal--duration). Events are further classified into "transitions" (characterized in terms of the states holding immediately before and after the event) and "tenures" (characterized in terms of a state holding when the event actually happens, but neither immediately before nor immediately after it). These categories are then considered in relation to both continuous and discrete models of time.

1980 ‘La filosofia de la causalidad en Davidson’ [‘The Philosophy of Causality in Davidson’, in Spanish], Diánoia, 26, 178-94.

Makes use of an atelic-telic aspectual distinction germane in many ways to the activity-accomplishment (Vendler 1957) or activity-performance (Kenny 1963) distinctions.

1986 ‘Causal Empiricism and Mental Events’, Philosophical Studies, 49, 393-403.

Points out a conflict between common materialist views about mental events and the empiricist ("Humean") approach to causation.

1972 ‘Changing Events in Dewey’s "Experience and Nature"’, Journal of the History of Philosophy, 10, 439-55.

Historical analysis of Dewey’s thesis that events--not only substances--change.

1969 ‘Here and Now’, The Monist, 53, 469-77; reprinted in E. Freeman and W. Sellars, eds. (1971), pp. 145-53.

A criticism of Gale’s (1968) thesis of the disanalogy between spatial, object-based principles and temporal, event-based concepts (see also Gale 1969). Argues that the differences pointed out by Gale are biased by a failure to eliminate tense in the formation of spatial analogues of temporal principles.

1955 ‘Causation and Recipes’, Mind, 54, 479-87; reprinted in Beauchamp, ed. (1974), pp. 126-32, and in Brand, ed. (1976), pp. 215-23.

A defense of the "production theory" of causation: we understand causal explanations only insofar as we imagine ourselves doing the thing explained. Argues that some causes are simultaneous with their effects.

1965 ‘Some Problems about Time’, Proceedings of the British Academy, 51, 321-36; reprinted in P. F. Strawson, ed., Studies in the Philosophy of Thought and Action, London, Oxford, and New York: Oxford University Press, 1968, pp. 175-91, and in P. Geach, Logic Matters, Oxford: Blackwell, 1972, pp. 302-17.

Against the Quinean view that time is a fourth dimension in which things extend ("a view that really abolishes change, by reducing change to a mere variation of attributes between different parts of a whole" [p. 304]). Amply discussed by Noonan 1976, 1980. Urges that discourse about events needs to be "demythologized": "Any sentence in which an event is represented by a noun-phrase like ‘Queen Anne’s death’ appears to be easily replaceable by an equivalent one in which the onomatoid [= seeming name] is paraphrased away; we could use instead a clause attaching some part of the verb ‘to die’ to the subject ‘Queen Anne’" [p. 313].

1968 ‘What Actually Exists’ (Symposium with R. H. Stoothoff), Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Suppl. Vol. 42, 7-16.

A discussion of the principle "x is actual if and only if x either acts, or undergoes change, or both" [p. 7] in relation to some entia non grata, among which events. See R. H. Stoothoff’s (1968) reply.

Introduces the notion of a mere "Cambridge Change"--a change occurring in an object if there is a predicate true of it at a time but false of it at a later time [p. 71], which could be the case even if the object does not undergo a "real" change.

1975 ‘The Logical Connection Argument and De Re Necessity’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 12, 349-54.

Argues that normal formulations of the "logical connection argument" (to the effect that factors that appear causally connected can be shown not to be so, at least when described in certain ways, if these factors are logically connected when so described) confuse propositions and events.

1979 ‘Überlegungen zu einer perspektivischen Handlungstheorie’ [‘Reflections on a Perspectival Action Theory’, in German], in H. Lenk, ed. (1979), Vol. 1, pp. 351-71.

1977 ‘Action, Behavior, and Bodily Movement: A Sketch of a Theory of Action’, Auslegung, 5, 43-57.

1983 A Study in the Ontology and Explanation of Action, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Kansas.

Defends Davidson’s view concerning action identity, but argues that it does not provide us with an ontology of events: Davidson has not shown that all actions are basic, and that all basic actions coincide with bodily movements; rather, he has shown "that all action expressions are coreferential with some expression of the form ‘his causing of such and such a bodily state’, and that these are basic action-descriptions" [Abstract]. Also suggests that the denotation of such basic descriptions is a species of mental event (a volitional thought-episode).

1984 ‘Davidson and Prichard: Actions as Bodily Movements and Volitions’, Southwestern Philosophical Review, 1, 107-18.

1985 ‘A Procedural Logic’, Proceedings of the 9th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-85), Vol. 1, Los Angeles: IJCAI [Morgan Kaufmann], pp. 516-23.

Presents a formalism based on the notion of process to represent common-sense knowledge of procedures or sequences of actions for achieving particular goals.

1986 ‘The Representation of Events in Multiagent Domains’, Proceedings of AAAI-86, Fifth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 1, Philadelphia: AAAI [Morgan Kaufmann], pp. 70-75.

Sets forth a model of actions and events for reasoning about dynamic domains involving multiple agents.

1987 ‘Actions, Processes, and Causality’, in M. P. Georgeff and A. L. Lansky, eds. (1987), pp. 99-122.

Further elaborating on the model set forth in (1986), argues that "the concept of causality can be employed to simplify the description of actions" and that "sets of causally interrelated actions can be grouped together in processes" [p. 99, Abstract].

1987 Reasoning About Actions and Plans: Proceedings of the 1986 Workshop, Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann.

1993 ‘Events and Processes in Situation Semantics’, in P. Aczel, D. Israel, Y. Katagiri, and S. Peters, eds., Situation Theory and Its Applications, Stanford: CSLI Lecture Notes No. 24, pp. 119-40.

A theory of events in which the "domain of influence of each event" is explicitly represented. Based on the framework of Barwise and Perry’s situation semantics (1981, 1983). Includes applications to the analysis of dynamic domains involving multiple agents.

1975 ‘Events are Perceivable but Time Is Not’, in J. T. Fraser and N. Lawrence, eds., The Study of Time II. Proceedings of the Second Conference of the International Society for the Study of Time, Berlin, Heidelberg, and New York: Springer-Verlag, pp. 295-301.

Argues that "there is no such thing as the perception of time, but only the perception of events and locomotions" [p. 295]. "Time is not a receptacle for events, just as space is not a receptacle for objects. A better metaphor would be to suggest [...] that time is the ghost of events and that space is the ghost of surfaces" [p. 299]. In any case, "events can be well or ill perceived, and there is no assumption that there must exist a sequence of phenomenal events corresponding to the physical events and running parallel to them" [p. 298].

1979 The Ecological Approach to Visual Perception, Boston: Houghton Mifflin; reprinted Hillsdale, NJ: Erlbaum, 1986.

Chapter VI [pp. 93-110] on "Events and the Information for Perceiving Events", deals with "ecological events" that "as distinguished from microphysical and astronomical events, occur at the level of substances and the surfaces that separate them from the medium" [p. 93]. Classifies "terrestrial" events into changes of layout (such as rigid translations and rotations of an object, collisions, nonrigid deformations, surface disruptions), changes of color and texture, changes of surface existence. Asserts that "we should begin thinking of events as the primary realities and of time as an abstraction from them" [p. 100]; that "time and space are not empty receptacles to be filled; instead, they are the ghosts of events and surfaces" [p. 101]. Further distinguishes between recurrence and nonrecurrence and between reversible and nonreversible events, and analyses the nesting of events.

1986 A Theory of Events, Doctoral Dissertation, Indiana University at Bloomington.

An event is a series of momentary states of affairs. Ample discussion of event identity.

1988 ‘The Ontological Status of Refraining’, The Journal of Value Inquiry, 22, 307-12.

Commenting on P. G. Smith (1986), argues that the ontological status of refraining is not as mysterious as it might seem. "[Refraining] seems to form some sort of middle ground between occurrence and nonoccurrence" [p. 307], but in the end "it is a thoroughly occurrent action" [p. 311].

1993 ‘On the Metaphysical Distinction Between Processes and Events’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 23, 365-84; reprinted in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 477-96.

Examines Mourelatos’s (1978) claim that events (= performances) and processes (= activities) form distinct categories, arguing that the differences between the two "cannot provide the basis for an ontological subcategorization of occurrences" [p. 366]. Argues that the issue is epistemological, not ontological. Reply in Mourelatos (1993).

Defends a volitional theory of action: actions are events with the property of having at their core "a mental event possessing an actish phenomenal quality" [p. x]. Actions are therefore a special kind of personal events, with canonical description ‘S’s V-ing at t’ (S a an agent designator, V a verb phrase, t a time). Chapter 3 discusses action individuation, with critical analysis of extant accounts. The proposed criterion is moderately "multiplying": x and y are the same action iff they have the same agent S, occur at the same time t, and either (i) x is semantically equivalent to y, or (ii) x consists in y (e.g., via a by-relation), or (iii) for every action z, Gen(z,x) iff Gen(z,y), where Gen is a "general generating relation" suitably extending the by-relation (for instance, Gen(a1,a2) holds when a1 can be described as ‘S’s V-ing at t1’ and a2 as ‘S’s W-ing at t2 by V-ing at t1’ for some W).

1995 ‘Action Theory’, in J. Kim and E. Sosa, eds., A Companion to Metaphysics, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, pp. 3-7.

A compact survey of the main topics in action theory, including identity and individuation.

A detailed study from an AI perspective. Says that "it is difficult to imagine how counterfactual implication can capture a causal relation that remains asymmetric" in cases such as (i) "If John had measles, he’d have koplic spots", and (ii) "If John had koplic spots, he’d have measles", both of which are valid [p. 69].

1987a ‘Reasoning About Action I: A Possible World Approach’, in F. M. Brown, ed., The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence. Proceedings of the 1987 Workshop, Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 233-58; revised version reprinted in Artificial Intelligence, 35 (1988), 165-95.

An AI approach to "reasoning about action" based on the idea of keeping a single model of the world that is updated when the action is performed. Germane to the strips approach (Lifschitz 1987a).

1987b ‘Reasoning About Action II: The Qualification Problem’, in F. M. Brown, ed., The Frame Problem in Artificial Intelligence. Proceedings of the 1987 Workshop, Los Altos, CA: Morgan Kaufmann, pp. 259-87; revised version reprinted in Artificial Intelligence, 35 (1988), 311-42.

An application of the (1987a) theory to the problem of describing all the preconditions of an action.

On a consequence of Kim’s criterion for event identity. A statue rotates. The bronze it is made of rotates too. If the statue and the piece of bronze are distinct, then so are the rotating of the statue and the rotating of the piece of bronze. "This seems counter-intuitive and perhaps unacceptable [...] Our unwillingness to think that there are two rotations can be nicely explained by the Davidsonian view which individuates events by causal considerations. Since these supposedly distinct rotations have exactly the same causes and the same effects, there are no good reasons for thinking that there are two rotations" [p. 16].

1990 ‘On the Location of Actions and Tryings: Criticism of an Internalist View’, Erkenntnis, 33, 39-56.

Argues (contra Hornsby) that actions are not internal events and that this is nevertheless compatible with the causal theory of action. One can reject the internalist thesis that the relationship between actions and bodily movements is that of cause and effect without rejecting the essentials of the causal view.

1993 ‘Distinguishing Between Events and Times: Some Evidence from the Semantics of Then’, Natural Language Semantics, 1, 285-312.

Distinguishes (within the frame of Discourse Representation Theory) between two uses of sentence-final then: (1) as a temporal anaphor referring back to a previously established explicit temporal referent, and (2) as a way of expressing relations between states/events (where no such referent is required).

1994a Event Structure in Natural Language Discourse, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Edinburgh.

1994b ‘Progressives, Events, and States’, in P. Dekker and M. Stokhof, eds., Proceedings of the 9th Amsterdam Colloquium, Amsterdam: Institute for Language, Logic and Computation, pp. 313-32.

Rejects the treatment of the progressive as a "stativiser" (Vlach 1981a) and develops an alternative account inspired by the analysis of C. S. Smith (1991) revisited in the framework of situation-theoretic discourse representation theory.

1995 ‘"When", Discourse Relations and the Thematic Structure of Events’, in P. Amsili, M. Borillo, and L. Vieu, eds. (1995), Part A, pp. 91-104.

A study of constructions of the form "When event1 event2" (as in "When John arrived at the airport, he went to the check-in desk"). The proposed account exploits the notion of a "subjective state transition".

1979 ‘Davidson and the Anomalismof the Mental’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 17, 163-74.

1977 ‘A Problem with Anomalous Monism’, Philosophical Studies, 32, 175-80.

Argues that Davidson’s (1970b) argument for anomalous monism equivocates two senses of the term ‘physical’. "In one sense, that in which every physical event falls under a law, it is not clear that mental events do cause physical events. In the other, that in which there are clear cases of mental events causing physical ones, it is not clear that the physical events fall under any law" [p. 178].

1970 A Theory of Human Action, Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall; reissued Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1976; partly reprinted in S. Davis, ed., Causal Theories of Mind. Action, Knowledge, Memory, Perception, and Reference, Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, 1983, pp. 73-127.

A very influential text, representative of the property exemplification account of the nature of events (compare Kim’s works). A particular act (or "act token") is "the exemplifiying of a property [or act type] by an agent at a time" [p. 10]. It follows that "two act-tokens are identical if and only if they involve the same agent, the same property, and the same time" [p. 10]. Chapter 2, "The Structure of Action", introduces the notion of "level-generation" (by-relation) to explicate the nature of the intimate connection between pairs of distinct acts such as John’s moving his hand and John’s moving his queen to QN7 (which a unifier would rather treat as identical). Reviewed by Brand (1972), Holborow (1973), Margolis (1974).

1971 ‘The Individuation of Action’, The Journal of Philosophy, 68, 761-74; reprinted in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 329-42.

Criticisms of Anscombe and Davidson on the identity of actions. "In the light of such difficulties, the units of actions must be sliced more thinly". Actions--or "act tokens"--are characterized as exemplifications of act types by persons at times (following the account put forward in Goldman 1970); hence their identity conditions are straightforward: actions are the same iff their internal constituents--agents, times of occurrence, and properties exemplified--are the same. The notion of an "act tree" is introduced to account for the intuitive unity among acts that are distinguished by this criterion (such as Boris’s squeezing his finger and his pulling of the trigger) as well as to capture the natural ordering among such acts. Discussion in Thomson (1971b), Hornsby (1979a, 1980a, Ch. I), J. A. Smith (1978), Lombard (1974, 1986, pp. 53-62), Pfeifer (1981a, 1982, 1989), and J. Bennett (1988, Chapters 5 and 13, 1995) inter alia.

1976 ‘The Volitional Theory Revisited’, in M. Brand and D. Walton, eds. (1976), pp. 67-86.

A critical review aimed at remodeling the doctrine of volition into "plausible form".

1978 ‘Chisholm’s Theory of Action’, Philosophia, 7 [Special Issue on "The Philosophy of Roderick M. Chisholm"], 583-96.

1982 ‘The Logic of the English Progressive’, Linguistic Inquiry, 13, 79-89.

Based on the assumption that "aspect in language never deals with a mental representation having the structure of a line, and consequently the attempts made by many linguists and philosophers to map the simple present and the progressive aspect in terms of events and states marked on the real time line, extending into the past and future, are necessarily inadequate to account for natural language semantics" [p. 83].

1951 The Structure of Appearance, Cambridge: Harvard University Press; revised edition, Dordrecht: Reidel, 1962; third edition 1977.

A statement of the thesis that there is no qualitative distinction between things and events. "What we think of as a phenomenal thing is distinguished from what we think of as a phenomenal event or process only in the pattern of differences among its temporal parts. A thing is a monotonous event; an event is an unstable thing" [1951, p. 286].

1984 ‘Special Relativity and the Location of Mental Events’, Analysis, 44, 126-27.

1979 ‘Omissions’, Tulane Studies in Philosophy, 28 [Issue on "Studies in Action Theory", ed. by R. C. Whittemore], 93-102.

Reformulates Brand’s (1971) criterion for omissions. "S omits to perform a at t if and only if (i) it is not the case that S performs a at t; and (ii) S had the ability and the opportunity to perform a at t." [p. 97]. Further defines the special cases of intentional, unintentional, and legal omissions. See discussion in Morillo (1979).

1982 ‘Intentional and Unintentional Actions’, Philosophical Studies, 41, 251-62.

A "theoretically well grounded" account of the difference between intentional and unintentional actions is proposed and argued to be compatible with Davidson’s account of act individuation.

1976 ‘A Method for Ontology, with Application to Numbers and Events’, The Journal of Philosophy, 73, 637-51.

Suggests a substitutional interpretation of the quantifiers in Davidson’s (1967a) logical form of action sentences so as to avoid ontological commitment to events.

1978 ‘No Entity Without Identity", Southwestern Journal of Philosophy, 9, 79-96.

Includes an argument to the effect that Davidson’s (1969a) criterion for event identity is inadequate to ground reference to events.

1980 Ontological Economy: Substitutional Quantification and Mathematics, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Chapter 3, on the criterion of ontological commitment, includes a discussion of the ontological import of logical analyses involving commitment to events via quantification.

1974 ‘Extensionality and Singular Causal Sentences’, Philosophical Studies, 25, 69-72.

Defends the extensionality of the context "... caused ---" by arguing that failure of substitutivity in sentences of the form "x caused y’s becoming e" is due to the opacity of the context "y’s becoming".

1980 ‘States and Performances: Aristotle’s Test’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 30, 117-30.

A defense of Aristotle’s original test for classifying actions into energeiai and kinêseis, with comparisons to the analyses/classifications of Ryle (1949), Kenny (1963), Vendler (1957), and Ackrill (1965). Compare also Mourelatos (1993).

Includes an application of predicate functor logics (which are regarded as a better vehicle for formalizing natural languages than standard predicate logic) to the analysis of action sentences.

1994 ‘Argument Deletion Without Events’, Notre Dame Journal of Formal Logic, 34, 607-20.

Describes a sound and complete formal language (obtained from a standard first-order language by adding a denumerable stock of "thematic role" markers for singular terms) within which polyadic properties and argument deletion can be dealt with without recourse to events. An exploitation of the ideas of Dowty (1989) following in the footsteps of Grandy (1976). The system allows for unrestricted argument deletion.

1996 ‘Asymmetrical and Symmetrical Dependency: A Particular Problem’, Aporia, 6, 17-34.

A critical analysis of Moravcsik’s (1965) criticism of Strawson’s (1959) views on the asymmetric relation of dependency between events and objects.

1979 ‘Refraining and Responsibility’, Tulane Studies in Philosophy, 28 [Issue on "Studies in Action Theory", ed. by R. C. Whittemore], 103-13.

1995 ‘Are Mental Events Preceded by Their Physical Causes?’, Philosophical Psychology, 8, 333-40.

Argues that mental events need not be preceded by their physical causes--at least, not for the reasons put forward by Libet (1985).

A detailed examination of Davidson (1967a). The final part puts forward a "constructivist" account of events exploiting the conception of a basic event as "one which consists of transitions of a subject item between contradictorily opposed states, like being fat and not being fat" [p. 21]. Discusses the possibility of a "coherently formulated distinction" between actions and events.

1977 ‘Eventual Change and Action Identity’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 14, 221-29.

Argues that the identity of actions such as the shooting and the killing of the victim can be accounted for in terms of eventual change: the shooting becomes a killing (by becoming the cause of a death). Compare J. Bennett (1973), Vollrath (1975), Anscombe (1979a), and Davidson (1985b, 1987) for similar accounts; compare also Thalberg (1975) and A. R. White (1979/80) for misgivings.

Argues that not all actions are purposive, and that purposiveness does not distinguish actions from mere behavior.

Works with the hypothesis that a verb has always associated with it an event structure which, when combined with other elements in the relevant clause, provides an event structure for an entire sentence.

1992 ‘Obligatory Adjuncts and the Structure of Events’, in E. Reuland and W. Abraham, eds., Knowledge and Language. Volume II: Lexical and Conceptual Structure, Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers, pp. 143-55.

Using the notion of event structure ("the aspectual structure of the eventuality denoted by the verbs"), offers an account of the occurrences of obligatory adjuncts (such as by-phrases) with passives and accomplishment verbs.

1997 ‘Logic and Language: A Glossary’, in J. van Benthem and A. G. B. ter Meulen, eds., Handbook of Logic and Language, Amsterdam: Elsevier; Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, pp. 1179-1213.

Includes an entry on events. Basic characterizaton: "An event is a unit of change in the external world, whose duration is measured in an interval of time" [p. 1189].

1971 ‘The Meaning of Time’, in E. Freeman and W. Sellars, eds. (1971), pp. 195-228.

Denies that "belonging to the present is a physical attribute of a physical event E which is independent of any judgmental awareness of the occurrence of E itself or of another event simultaneous with it" [p. 209]. On the other hand, "the temporal relations of earlier than, later than, and simultaneity do, of course, obtain among physical events in their own right in the sense familiar from the theory of relativity" [p. 228].

1989 ‘Why Thematic Kinships between Events Do Not Attest Their Causal Linkage’, in J. B. Brown and J. Mittelstrass, eds., An Intimate Relation, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 477-94; reprinted in Epistemologia, 13 (1990), 187-208.

Argues that the existence of a thematic connection between two events does not by itself justify the assertion of the existence of a causal linkage. Based on evidence from psychoanalysis.

1992 ‘The Role of Tense in Perceptual Reports’, in E. Fava, ed., Proceedings of the XVII Meeting of Generative Grammar. Volume Presented to Giuseppe Francescato on the Occasion of His 70th Birthday, Torino: Rosenberg & Sellier, pp. 233-47.

Argues that the complement of ‘see’ in a sentence like "John saw Mary laugh" refers to an event, whereas in a sentence like "John saw that Mary laughed" it refers to a proposition. Following Higginbotham (1983), argues that "the event interpretation is ensured by the lack of a referential tense in the complements of perception verbs" [p. 233].

1977 ‘Remarks on the Present Perfect in English’, in C. Rohrer, ed. (1977), pp. 83-98.

1979 ‘Time Schemes, Tense Logic and the Analysis of English Trees’, in F. Guenthner and S. J. Schmidt, eds., Formal Semantics and Pragmatics for Natural Languages, Dordrecht: Reidel, pp. 201-22.

An investigation into the adequacy of various tense logics in describing and explaining tensed constructions in natural language.

1987 ‘Agent-Causation and Event-Causation’, Indian Philosophical Quarterly, 14, 409-30.

1973 ‘A Critical Survey of the Reasons vs. Causes Argument in Recent Philosophy of Action’, Metaphilosophy, 4, 269-97.

Embeds the philosophy of action in a naturalized account of agents. Brief discussion of the unifier/multiplier debate on action identity [pp. 179-81]; endorses Castañeda’s view that "multipliers and unifiers differ in how they use the word ‘action’" [p. 179].

1991 ‘Prichard, Davidson and Action’, Philosophical Investigations, 14, 205-30.

An examination of the structural similarities between Davidson’s and Prichard’s theories of action.

1994 ‘Anomalous Monism’, in S. Guttenplan, ed., A Companion to the Philosophy of Mind, Oxford and Cambridge, MA: Blackwell, p. 122.

1985 ‘Possible Events, Actual Events, and Robots’, Computational Intelligence, 1/2, 59-70.

1981 ‘Events and the Exemplifications of Properties’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 31, 242-7.

Criticizes Kim’s analysis for understating any distinctions between events and states. Maintains that the central and "self-evidently essential" feature of events is "that they are changes", whereas "our concept of a state of an object is not the same as our concept of a change to an object" [p. 243]. Other differences: "Events take place, happen, occur or befall [...] States, on the other hand, obtain rather than take place, persist rather than occur [...] Events happen to objects, whereas objects are in certain states" [ibid.].

1982a ‘Events, Ontology and Grammar’, Philosophy, 57, 477-86; reprinted in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 79-88.

Argues that the question of the existence of events is surrounded by a cloud of conceptual confusion. For one thing, events cannot be "introduced" or "eliminated" by philosophical discussions. Moreover, the very question ‘do events exist?’ is suspect, for "the esse of events is to take place, happen or occur, but not to exist" [p. 479]. (More worthy are questions of ontological priority: are objects ontologically prior to events, or is it the other way around? Or are both categories equally "basic"?) Objects to Davidson’s overall program to account for the logical articulations of our language by exhibiting the "logical form" of ordinary sentences in a first-order calculus.

1982b ‘Events and Objects in Space and Time’, Mind, 91, 1-19; reprinted in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 429-47.

Develops on Quinton (1979) on the dissimilarities between events and material objects. Much of the difference is apparent from their respective relation to space. Both have spatial location, but objects, not events, occupy space. Thus events have no dimensionality, no shape, no size.

1991 Representing Plans under Uncertainty: A Logic of Time, Chance, and Action, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Illinois at Urbana; revised version published with the same title, Berlin: Springer-Verlag, 1994; partly reprinted in Haddawy (1996).

1996 ‘A Logic of Time, Chance, and Action for Representing Plans’, Artificial Intelligence, 80, 243-308.

Section 2 on the underlying ontology. Distinguishes events from facts (a fact, but not an event, holds over every subinterval of any interval over which it holds) as well as between event types and event tokens, and treats actions as events brought about by agents. The representation system is based on Goldman’s (1970) theory and exploits the notion of "level-generation".

1994 Continuity and Change in the Development of Russell’s Philosophy, Dordrecht, Boston, and London: Kluwer Academic Publishers; Warszawa: Polish Scientific Publishers.

Chapter 4, on causality, includes a brief discussion of the "slingshot" argument [pp. 91-92].

An attempt to characterize the distinction between acts (such as killing) and omissions (such as letting die).

1982 Urteile und Ereignisse. Studien zur philosophischen Logik und Erkenntnistheorie [Judgments and Events. Studies in Philosophical Logic and the Theory of Knowledge, in German], Freiburg and München: Alber.

1969 ‘Starting and Stopping’, The Monist, 53, 410-25; reprinted in E. Freeman and W. Sellars, eds. (1971), pp. 86-101.

In what state is an object when it starts to move or to change? From the untenability of some standard accounts in terms of instants, Hamblin develops a logic on change based on intervals; over an interval a thing can be--without contradiction--in two different states.

Includes a discussion of topics such as ontological commitment to events and the relation between time and events. An event is defined as "an item corresponding [...] to a non-continuous-tensed verb, as opposed to a process or state where there is the reflection of a continuous-tensed verb of one kind or another. A fact is what is statable by means of a true proposition or statement" [p. 56].

1986 ‘Default Reasoning, Nonmonotonic Logics, and the Frame Problem’, Proceedings of AAAI-86, Fifth National Conference on Artificial Intelligence, Vol. 1, Philadelphia: AAAI [Morgan Kaufmann], pp. 328-33.

A discussion of the so-called "frame problem": "given an initial description of the world (some facts that are true), the occurrence of some events, and some notion of causality (that an event occurring can cause a fact to become true), what facts are true once all the events have occurred?" [p. 330]. As a case-study, what has come to be known as the "Yale shooting problem" is introduced.

1987 ‘Nonmonotonic Logic and Temporal Projection’, Artificial Intelligence, 33, 379-412; reprinted in J. F. Allen, J. Hendler, and A. Tate, eds. (1990), pp. 624-40.

Expanded version of (1986), including reports on various criticisms and responses.

1981 ‘Single Case Propensities and the Explanation of Particular Events’, Synthese, 48, 409-36.

On a dilemma for theories of statistical explanation. Relevance of the dilemma to the traditional conception of an explanandum event as a "static" attribute, outcome, or state of affairs.

1987 ‘Sobre la filosofia de Donald Davidson’ [‘On the Philosophy of Donald Davidson’, in Spanish], Critica, 19, 97-115.

1989 ‘On the Representation of Events: A Study of Orientation, Recall, and Recognition’, Journal of Experimental Psychology, General, 118, 136-47.

An experimental psychological study of how orientation toward an event affects both its perception of the memory of it.

1975 Causing, Perceiving and Believing. An Examination of the Philosophy of C. J. Ducasse, Dordrecht and Boston: Reidel.

Chapter 2, "Causality and Necessity", includes a critical analysis of Ducasse’s "inclusive" view of events as changes or unchanges in states of affairs [pp. 15ff].

1970 ‘Deep Structure as Logical Form’, Synthese, 21, 275-97; reprinted in D. Davidson and G. Harman, eds. (1972), pp. 25-47.

Sec. 4 examines "what sort of theory results if deep structure is identified with logical form in the analysis of action sentences and causal sentences" [p. 38]. The account is based on Davidson (1967a) and concludes that "one cannot say that the deep structure of [Jack opened the door with the key at ten o’clock] is embedded in that of [Fear caused Jack to open the door with the key at ten o’clock] and the usual syntactic analysis of these sentences must be rejected" [p. 41].

1975 ‘Logical Form’, in D. Davidson and G. Harman, eds., The Logic of Grammar, Encino, CA: Dickenson, pp. 289-307.

1981 ‘The Essential Grammar of Action (and Other) Sentences’, Philosophia, 10, 209-16.

Argues that a Strawsonian (1959) framework in which reference to objects is more basic than reference to events makes it difficult to provide a satisfactory account of adverbial modification.

1973 ‘In Defense of Natural Agents’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 23, 117-32.

1981 ‘Causes and Events’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 42, 236-53.

Argues that causation is best accounted for within a descriptive framework based on the notion of a temporally extended event (as opposed to, e.g., a more traditional framework based on spatial manifolds made up of objects and voids).

Chapter XI, "Events, Individuals and Predication: A Defense of Event Pluralism", contends that thing- or substance-way of speaking is only a shorthand for the metaphysically more fundamental event talk. Critical review in R. M. Martin (1971b).

1985 Change, Persistence and Explanation, Doctoral Dissertation, Stanford University.

Against the token-identity theory of the mental and the physical, promotes weak supervenience as a variety of physicalist monism which implies no identity theory and yet preserves a primacy for physical events. Includes critical discussion of Davidson’s (1970b) argument.

1984a ‘Ontological Supervenience’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 22, Suppl. Vol., 1-12 [Spindel Conference 1983, "Supervenience", ed. T. Horgan].

Macro-causal relations as well as causal relations involving psychological events are explained in terms of supervenient causation, which in turn is characterized as a case of "strong supervenience".

1984b ‘Response: Phenomenal Causes’, The Southern Journal of Philosophy, 22, Suppl. Vol., 63-70 [Spindel Conference 1983, "Supervenience", ed. T. Horgan].

1992 ‘Thresholds, Transitivity, Overdetermination, and Events’, Analysis, 52, 159-63.

Argues that "in circumstances involving causal thresholds or causal overdetermination one cannot consistently hold both that causation is a transitive relation and that its relata are ‘coarse-grained’ events individuated by their spatial and temporal boundaries" [The Philosopher’s Index Abstract].

1971 ‘The Logic of Actions’, in B. Meltzer and D. Michie, eds., Machine Intelligence 6, Edimburgh: Edimburgh University Press, pp. 495-520.

Early AI approach to the modelling of actions (= means for moving from one situation to another). Discussion of the "frame problem" (which facts remain unchanged when actions are performed).

1979 ‘The Naive Physics Manifesto’, in D. Michie, ed., Expert Systems in the Micro-Electronic Age, Edimburgh: Edimburgh University Press, pp. 242-70; reprinted in M. A. Boden, ed., The Philosophy of Artificial Intelligence, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990, pp. 171-205.

Inaugurates a vast research program aimed at describing the salient features of our naive way of conceptualizing the physical world and implementing them on computers, so that these can better interact with human agents. A special place is dedicated to actions, changes, and processes.

1985a ‘The Second Naive Physics Manifesto’, in J. R. Hobbs and R. C. Moore, eds., Formal Theories of the Commonsense World, Norwood: Ablex, pp. 1-36; reprinted in G. F. Langer, ed., Computation and Intelligence. Collected Readings, Menlo Park, CA: AAAI Press, and Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995, pp. 567-86.

"Events happen in time, but also in space--they have a where as well as a when. They are four-dimensional spatio-temporal entities" [p. 24].

1985b ‘Naive Physics I: Ontology for Liquids’, in J. R. Hobbs and R. C. Moore, eds., Formal Theories of the Commonsense World, Norwood: Ablex, pp. 71-107.

Makes use of the notion of a "history": "a connected piece of space-time in which ‘something happens’, more or less separate from other such pieces" [p. 90] (for instance, "the inside of a room during an afternoon"). Histories contain events, isolating them temporally and spatially from other events.

1979 ‘Counterpart-Theoretic Semantics for Modal Logic’, The Journal of Philosophy, 76, 319-38.

Remarks that if the death of Caesar were essentially of Caesar (i.e., if "it could not have occurred without being the death of Caesar"), then Lewis’s counterpart-theoretic semantics for modal logic "would have the consequence that Caesar and his death could have at most one counterpart apiece in any world" [pp. 328-29].

1970b ‘On the Individuation of Actions’, Inquiry, 13 [Special Issue on "Action"], 125-28.

A discussion of Davidson (1967a) focusing on some problems about identity criteria for actions. Oedipus struck the rude old man intentionally, but he did not strike his father intentionally--yet on Davidson’s theory there was just one striking (the old man being the same as Oedipus’s father). Davidson’s reply in (1970c), following Anscombe (1957).

1972 ‘On When There Must Be a Time-Difference between Cause and Effect’, Philosophy of Science, 39, 507-11.

"An adequate view of what is to be an event must illuminate the enterprise of seeking to establish a singular causal statement". Objects that Kim’s property exemplification account of events does not permit redescriptions of events, since any change (addition or deletion) in a given event description would alter the constitutive property of the described event. Kim’s reply in (1976).

1973 ‘On "Redescribing" Cause and Effect in Action Contexts’, Noûs, 7, 299-307.

A criticism of Davidson’s account of the causal relations between wants and actions in terms of redescriptions in neurological terms.

Contains Audi (1993b), L. R. Baker (1993), Burge (1993), Davidson (1993c), Dretske (1993), Hornsby (1993), Kim (1993a, 1993b), McLaughlin (1993), and Sosa (1993).

1983 ‘House-Cleaning and the Time of a Killing’, Philosophical Studies, 44, 381-89.

Discussion of Thomson (1971b): the action of killing does not extend beyond the time of the shooting even if the victim dies at a later time.

1984 ‘Temporal Parts and Four-Dimensional Objects’, Philosophical Studies, 46, 323-34; reprinted in M. Rea, ed., Material Constitution. A Reader, Lanham, MD: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997, pp. 320-30.

1990 The Ontology of Physical Objects: Four-Dimensional Hunks of Matter, New York: Cambridge University Press.

Study of "an ontology of four-dimensional hunks of matter". Argues "that every filled region of space-time is exactly filled by one such object and that any one of these objects has its actual spatiotemporal configuration and location at every world at which it exists. This ontology should be contrasted with [...] our standard ontology, according to which one and the same three-dimensional object exists in its entirety at several times and at several worlds, having a different spatiotemporal shape and location at many of these other worlds" [p. ix].

1992 ‘Things Change’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 52, 695-704.

A defense of the doctrine of temporal parts (given any period of time during which a material object exists, there are parts of the object that exist at that and at no other time). Criticisms in Lombard (1994).

Contra Kim (1974) argues that "Cambridge" events (e.g. Xanthippe’s becoming a widow) "are not events, and a fortiori cannot stand in a relation of dependence to other events, whether of causal or non-causal dependence" [p. 140].

1965 Aspects of Scientific Explanation, New York: The Free Press; London: Collier-Macmillan.

Distinguishes between "sentential" events and "concrete" events [pp. 421ff]. The former are those fact-like entities that can be explained by answering questions of the form ‘Why is it the case that p?’. The latter are not described by sentences but by noun phrases: individual names or definite descriptions.

1973 ‘Modeling Simultaneous Actions and Continuous Processes’, Artificial Intelligence, 4, 145-80.

Outlines an AI methodology "which makes possible the modeling of (1) simultaneous, interactive processes, (2) processes characterized by a continuum gradual change, (3) involuntarily activated processes (such as the growing of grass), and (4) time as a continuous phenomenon" [Author’s Abstract].

1973 ‘Sentence and Predicate Modifiers in English’, in J. P. Kimbal, ed., Syntax and Semantics, Volume 2, New York: Seminar Press, pp. 217-45.

Argues that "if we are content to deal with modifiers at the level where they appear simply as primitive operators on predicates [as suggested e.g. by Clark (1970), Montague (1970a), T. Parsons (1970), Thomason and Stalnaker (1973)], we lose access to all their linguistically interesting and perhaps too many of their logically interesting properties. The alternative, I suppose, is to leap into the uncharted swamp that lies out there somewhere beyond tense logic" [pp. 243-44].

1982 ‘Tense, Aspect and Time Adverbials, II’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 5 [Special Issue on "The Semantics of Temporal Elements", R. Wall and R. E. Grandy, eds.], 109-154.

A plea for "the embedding of the semantics of Part I [B. Richards (1982)] in a framework in which pragmatic considerations can interact freely with the semantics, to restrict the domains within which quantification is permitted" [p. 154].

1991a ‘Perfective and Imperfective Aspect and the Theory of Events and States’, Linguistics, 29, 969-1010.

Develops a formal theory of states, events, and event types which "gives the conceptual foundations for the semantics of aspect, accords events the logical status of individuals characterized by heterogeneous type predicates but treats states as homogeneous properties of times" [p. 969, Abstract]. The analysis of states exploits the fact that "states are not individuals from the logical point of view".

1991b ‘Temporale Konjunktionen und Aspekt. Der sprachliche Ausdruck von Zeitrelationen zwischen Situationen’ [‘Temporal Conjunctions and Aspect. The Linguistic Expression of Temporal Relations among Situations’, in German], Kognitionswissenschaft, 2, 51-90.

Uses the theory of times, events, event types, and states of (1991a) to provide an account of temporal and durational conjunctions in German.

1990 ‘Passage and the Presence of Experience’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 50, 537-52.

1988 ‘Things in Space and Time’, in J. S. Petöfi, ed., Text and Discourse Constitution. Empirical Aspects, Theoretical Approaches, Berlin and New York: de Gruyter, pp. 377-418.

A nominalistic approach "construing everything needed within the interpretation of natural language texts [...] exclusively by means of reference to individuals" [p. 380]. The slogan: "no space-time without things, no things without space-time" [p. 388]. With the help of a rich mereological apparatus, events are construed as virtual classes of virtual classes with two individuals as members: a mereological atom and a so-called conglomerate (see § 3.3 for details). The construction is such that "although it is not the case generally that every object is an event or that every event is an object, each object or event comprises objects as well as events as parts. In some models there is even no difference between objects and events at all" [p. 413].

1983 ‘The Logic of Perceptual Reports: An Extensional Alternative to Situation Semantics’, The Journal of Philosophy, 80, 100-27; reprinted in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 19-46.

In response to Barwise (1981), proposes a first-order extensional semantic analysis of naked infinitive perceptual reports as involving quantification over individual events in the spirit of Davidson’s (1967a) analysis of action sentences. For instance, ‘John saw Mary leave’ is analysed as having the logical form ($e)(Leave(Mary,e) & See(John,e))). See Vlach (1983) for a similar account. Critical discussion in Asher and Bonevac (1985a) and Neale (1988).

Includes a discussion of event-based analyses of perception verbs [pp. 554ff], adverbial modification [pp. 562ff], naked infinitives [pp. 588ff].

1986 ‘Linguistic Theory and Davidson’s Program in Semantics’, in E. LePore, ed., Truth and Interpretation. Perspectives on the Philosophy of Donald Davidson, Oxford: Basil Blackwell, pp. 29-48.

Argues that a Davidsonian analysis of action sentences allow to account for the inference from ‘John does anything that Bill does’ and ‘Bill jogs’ to ‘John jogs’ within classical first order logic (based on a problem from Chierchia 1984).

1989 ‘Elucidations of Meaning’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 12 [Special Issue on "Studies on Logical Form and Semantic Interpretation", R. May, ed.], 465-517.

Argues that what have come to be called "semantic postulates" of a language reduce to "elucidations" of lexical meanings that are tacitly known by native speakers. Includes an elaboration of the thesis advanced in Higginbotham (1985) that "reference to events is the appropriate way to view properties of subordinate clauses and modification" [p. 465].

Some mental states that arise when one locates a sentence’s content as belonging to one’s present or past are reflexive, i.e., they include themselves as constituents of their contents. "That content is then a tensed thought, ordering one’s present state with respect to the content. Anaphoric cross-reference between an event or state (understood as in Davidson [1967a]) and a constituent of its content is responsible [...] for the phenomenon of sequence of tense in English. Conversely, the fact that some states are necessarily reflexive supports the view that the elaborations of logical form that account for sequence of tense are no mere artefact of semantics, but even intrinsic to some of our utterances and thoughts" [p. 226, Abstract].

1995 ‘Some Philosophy of Language’, in L. R. Gleitman and M. Liberman, eds., An Introduction to Cognitive Science. Vol. I: Language, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press/Bradford Books, pp. 399-427.

1986 ‘Plurals’, in J. Carter and R.-M. Déchaine, eds., Proceedings of the Sixteenth Annual Meeting, North-Eastern Linguistic Society, University of Massachusetts at Amherst: GLSA, pp. 161-75.

An account of plurals as referring "not to objects, but to predicates, or to concepts in the sense of Frege". This view is "intimately connected with the thesis that the predicates of natural language are first of all classifiers of events, in the sense of Davidson [...] The concepts to which plurals refer put conditions on the nature of the participants in events. Thus a sentence like John and Mary lifted the piano (together) does not report the exploits of a ‘plural object’, but an event that had more than one agent" [p. 162]. Full developments in Schein (1986, 1993).

Critical review of Mellor (1995), with Mellor’s replies in (1997). Suggests that "if Don’s rope broke and he failed to fall, then his failing to fall, his floating there in space, would be a surprising and significant event in his life" [p. 4].

1983 ‘The Semantics of the English Progressive: A Study in Situation Semantics’, in A. Chukerman, M. Marks, and J. F. Richardson, eds., CLS19: Papers from the Nineteenth Regional Meeting of the Chicago Linguistic Society, Chicago: Chicago Linguistic Society, pp. 171-82.

Argues that an adequate account of the progressive must combine Dowty’s (1977) "modal analysis" with M. Bennett’s (1981) and T. Parsons’s (1980) "non modal analysis". This is done within the framework of Barwise and Perry’s situation semantics (1981, 1983), which "allows for partially defined courses of events and structural constraints obtaining between courses of events" (both features being crucial for the proposed account). Includes an discussion of the "imperfective paradox".

1985 A Compositional Semantics for Aktionsarten and NP Reference in English, Doctoral Dissertation, Ohio State University.

A semantic account of English Aktionsarten exploiting the analogy between the mass-count distinction and the distinction between atelic and telic events.

1986 ‘Temporal Anaphora in Discourses of English’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 9 [Special Issue on "Tense and Aspect in Discourse", D. R. Dowty, ed.], 63-82.

Applies the system of event structures of Kamp (1979) to the analysis of anaphoric relationships between temporal expressions.

1982 ‘Temporal Discourse and Semantical Games’, Linguistics and Philosophy, 5 [Special Issue on "The Semantics of Temporal Elements", R. Wall and R. E. Grandy, eds.], 3-22.

Proposes a game-theoretical semantical account for English tenses and time adverbs, including an account of the distinction between distributive and collective uses of verbs, which is meant to show "that we do not need the collective-distributive contrast in any shape, size or form, and hence do not need Davidson’s ontology either. [...] Thus our theory tells against the reification of events" [pp. 6-7].

There can be no identity of mental and physical events because there are no events.

1971/2 ‘Inanimate Agency’, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 72, 195-213.

Offers "an account of non-human agency which [...] does not require us to abandon the claim that in some way statements about non-human objects causing things to happen imply statements about a causal relation between events" [p. 196]. In short, "agency statements imply causal statements (for non-human actions)" [p. 212]. More generally, in regard to action theory broadly understood: "we may be misled into thinking that the action is an event [...] Although an event occurs when the agent acts, the action is not that event [...] Because the event is caused in a certain way the agent is said to produce the effect and its action is the producing or causing of this effect" [pp. 212-13].

1996 ‘The Role of Contrast in Causal and Explanatory Claims’, Synthese, 107, 395-419.

Outlines a unified account of the role of contrastive stress in various contexts, including of causal statements (in the spirit of Dretske 1977).

1991 ‘Aspect and Adverbials’, in S. Moore and A. Z. Wyner, eds., Proceedings of the First Semantics and Linguistics Theory Conference (SALT I), Ithaca, NY: Cornell Working Papers in Linguistics, n. 10, pp. 107-26.

Proposes a treatment of the prepositions heading temporal adverbials as binary operators that select aspectual properties of their arguments (extending the characterization of Dowty 1986 to include such basic properties of events as culmination) and that order the arguments temporally.

1995 ‘Sketch of an Ontology Underlying the Way We Talk about the World’, International Journal of Human-Computer Studies, 43 [special issue on "The Role of Formal Ontology in the Information Technology", N. Guarino and R. Poli, eds.], 819-30.

Section 6 treats causality as a relation among events as well as states (as in ‘The slipperiness of the ice caused John to fall’) or agents (as ‘John lifted his arm’: "we probably don’t want to coerce this argument into some imagined event taking place inside John" [p. 827]). States are characterized generally as predications; events are changes of states; actions are causing of events by intentional agents; and processes are sequences of events or actions.

1987 ‘Commonsense Metaphysics and Lexical Semantics’, Computational Linguistics, 13, 241-50.

An influential AI project for developing common-sense theories of various domains of discourse, including time and causality. "There are two possible ontologies for time. In the first [...] there is a time line [...] In the second ontology, the one that seems more deeply rooted in language, the world consists of a large number of more or less independent processes, or histories, or sequences of events" [p. 244]. The latter ontology is axiomatized using a primitive relation of change between events.

1991 The Mind Matters. Consciousness and Choice in a Quantum World, Oxford: Clarendon Press.

Chapter 2 [pp. 38-62] on mental events and their relationships with physical events.

1978 ‘A Treatment of Activity Verbs in a Montague-Type Grammar: A First Approximation’, in F. Guenthner and C. Rohrer, eds., Studies in Formal Semantics: Intentionality, Temporality, Negation, Amsterdam: North-Holland, pp. 121-65.

An attempt to account for Vendler’s (1957) fourfold classification of verb types (states, activities, accomplishments, and achievements) within the framework of Montague grammar (1973). Focuses on activity verbs. Compare also Vlach (1981b).

1980 ‘On the Mass-Count Distinction and the French Imparfait and Passé Simple’, in C. Rohrer, ed. (1980), pp. 85-112.

Presents a semantics of the French imparfait and passé simple which "provides a formal basis for the intuition that the imparfait has affinity to mass expressions and the passé simple to count expression" [p. 85].

1981 ‘Remarks on Noch and Schon in German’ in P. Tedeschi and A. Zaenen, eds. (1981), pp. 103-26.

Proposes a way of establishing a link between a verb classification in the spirit of Vendler (1957) and different meanings of ‘still’ and ‘already’ (in German).

Chapter 4 contains an argument for the claim that the category of events (among others) is necessarily such that it is instantiated either multiply or not at all.

1970 Identities, States, and the Mind-Body Problem, Doctoral Dissertation, University of Michigan.

1981 ‘Psychophysical Lawlike Connections and Their Problem’, Inquiry, 24, 277-304.

1982 ‘The Argument for Anomalous Monism’, Analysis, 16, 59-64; reprinted with revisions as Chapter 1 of (1988).

"Donald Davidson’s principle of the nomological character of causality needs to be supplemented by the truth that the nomological connection goes with causally relevant properties. Are mental events causally relevant as mental or as physical events? Either answer is bad news for anomalous monism" [The Philosopher’s Index Abstract].

1983 ‘Anomalous Monism: Reply to Smith’s "Bad News for Anomalous Monism"’, Analysis, 43, 147-49.

1988 A Theory of Determinism. The Mind, Neuroscience, and Life-Hopes, Oxford: Oxford University Press.

Offers a materialist model for action explanation based on the Hypothesis of Psychoneural Nomic Correlation: "For each mental event of a given type there exists some simultaneous neural event of one of a certain set of types. The existence of the neural event necessitates the existence of the mental event, the mental event thus being necessary to the neural event" [p. 107].

1992 ‘Causation: One Thing Just Happens After Another’, in L. E. Hahn, ed., The Philosophy of A. J. Ayer [The Library of Living Philosophers], Peru, IL: Open Court, pp. 243-70.

1994 ‘Functionalism, Identity Theories, the Union Theory’, in Warner and Szubka, eds. (1994), pp. 215-35.

Defends the view "that a mental event and the simultaneous neural event are nomically related, as specified by the correlation hypothesis [in the sense of (1988)], and that they constitute a single effect, and that each event may be causal with respect to an action or later mental event" [p. 230].

1971 ‘The Relational Doctrines of Space and Time’, British Journal for the Philosophy of Science, 22, 97-130.

Examines the implications of relational theory of time, i.e., the view that time is a logical construction out of events and relations among them.

1988 Quine. Language, Experience and Reality, Stanford: Stanford University Press.

1978 ‘The Case Against Events’, The Philosophical Review, 87, 28-47; reprinted in R. Casati and A. C. Varzi, eds. (1996), pp. 243-62.

A representative formulation of the non-realist position with regard to events. "I will show that despite the initial appearances, there is no real theoretical need to postulate events. So, since their elimination yields an important simplification of ontology, we should banish them from existence" [1978, p. 28]. The "no real theoretical need" is tested against (i) Davidson’s remarks on causality ("slingshot" argument), (ii) the notion of "same action under different descriptions", (iii) the mind-body problem, and (iv) adverbial modification (pro semantics à la Clark 1970). Compare Altman, Bradie & Miller (1979) for a critical assessment. Developments in (1981b).

1980a ‘Non-rigid Event-Designators and the Modal Individuation of Events’, Philosophical Studies, 36, 341-51.

A critical analysis of Brand’s (1976a, 1977) account of event identity, concluding that "it needlessly complicates the metaphysics of events--by generating gratuitous obstacles to a Humean treatment of causation, by multiplying distinct events beyond necessity, and by introducing unnecessary noncausal dependence-relations among events" [p. 350].

1980b ‘Humean Causation and Kim’s Theory of Events’, Canadian Journal of Philosophy, 10, 663-79.

Suggests that Kim’s account of causation in terms of lawful constant conjunction between the constitutive properties of the causing and caused events requires limiting the class of such properties (in the property exemplification conception of events) to those countenanced by exceptionless laws. Thus, not every event-denoting nominalized sentence (‘John’s thinking of Vienna’) expresses the constitutive property of the event denoted.

1981a ‘Token Physicalism, Supervenience, and the Generality of Physics’, Synthese, 49, 395-413.

A criticism of Fodor’s (1974) doctrine of "token physicalism", moving from Fodor’s own theory of events.

Exploiting the idea that the basic definitions of Goldman’s (1970) action theory can be transformed so as to preserve their conceptual content without any ontological commitment to actions. For instance, Goldman’s notion of "level-generation" is expressed by a non-truthfunctional causal connective (‘and thereby’) and the notion of "basic action" can be expressed by an adverbial modifier, as in "John coughs in a basic-acting manner".

1982 ‘Substitutivity and the Causal Connective’, Philosophical Studies, 42, 47-52.

A defense of the claim put forward in (1978) that singular causal statements have the logical form "A because B", where ‘because’ is a sentential connective. There is also a defense of the appeal to Occam’s razor against "Russell’s razor" (contra Altman, Bradie and Miller 1979).

Argues that a positive account of "quausation" (4-place relation expressed by locutions of the form "c qua F causes e qua G") makes it plausible to answer the question of the causal efficacy of the mental qua mental. Argument and underlying analysis are formulated within a Davidsonian event-based account, though these are "expository fictions".

1991 ‘Actions, Reasons, and the Explanatory Role of Content’, in B. P. McLaughlin, ed., Dretske and His Critics, Oxford: Blackwell, pp. 73-101.

1993 ‘From Supervenience to Superdupervenience: Meeting the Demands of a Material World’, Mind, 102, 555-86.

A state-of-the-art overview of the concept of supervenience, including its uses in relation to the problem of mental causation.

1994 ‘Nonreductive Materialism’, in Warner and Szubka, eds. (1994), pp. 236-41.

A defense of a nonreductive form of naturalism that is "robustly realist" about mental causation.

1985 ‘Against the Token Identity Theory’, in E. LePore and B. P. McLaughlin, eds. (1985), pp. 427-43.

Criticizes Davidson’s anomalous monism using inter alia the principle that "quite often there is no such thing as ‘the cause’ (at a given time) of a particular event [...] Which event one calls ‘the cause’ is normally a contextually determined affair" [p. 430]. Argues further that mental events do not exist, distinguishing this view from eliminative materialism.

A criticism of Thalberg (1977) on the individuation of actions: one should not confuse questions about particulars (people’s doings of things) with questions about universals (the things that people do).

"If there is to be any hope of truth in an identification of actions with bodily movements, then they must be movementsT, not movementsI, that are actions--his movingsT of his body, not his body’s movingsI" [p. 3; ‘T’ for transitive, ‘I’ for intransitive]. "This provides an explanation of why we do not answer the question ‘What did he do?’ with ‘His body moved’. We can always answer with ‘He movedT his body’. But that rules out giving ‘His body movedI’ as answer" [p. 13]. On action and causation: "Event causality is prior to agency in respect to explanation, and [...] an account of human action does not require some other notion of causality" [p. 89].

1980b ‘Verbs and Events’, in J. Dancey, ed., Papers in Logic and Language, Keele: Keele University Library, pp. 88-111.

1980c ‘Action and Ability’, in R. Haller and W. Grassl, eds., Language, Logic, and Philosophy: Proceedings of the 4th International Wittgenstein Symposium, Vienna: Hölder-Pichler-Tempsky, pp. 387-91.

Distinguishes two notions of basicness corresponding to two distinct roles that the concept of basic action has been supposed to fill: (i) to elucidate ‘the structure’ of action, and (ii) to give an account of what it is to do something ‘directly’ or ‘just like that’. Claims that no single concept will fill both roles.

"A man’s trying to raise his arm is a necessary condition of his raising his arm intentionally, and [...] this--that he tried to raise it--in conjunction with the facts that his arm goes up and that it goes up because he tried to raise it, may take us toward a sufficient condition for his having intentionally raised his arm" [p. 73].

1980/1 ‘Which Physical Events are Mental Events?, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, 81, 73-92.

The answer involves a challenge of the mereological and "Humean" conception of event in favor of the view of events as genuine particulars.

1981a ‘Reply to Weil’s and Thalberg’s "Basic and Non-Basic Actions"’, Analysis, 41, 18-21.

On Lowe (1981); compare the rest of the exchange in Lowe (1983, 1984) and Hornsby (1983).

1983 ‘Events That Are Causings: A Response to Lowe’, Analysis, 43, 141-42.

1985 ‘Physicalism, Events, and Part-Whole Relations’, in E. LePore and B. P. McLaughlin, eds. (1985), pp. 444-58.

Criticizes the construal of continuants and events by means of mereological fusions. The fusion of two continuants need not be a continuant; likewise in the case of events, one should not tolerate "the extraordinary events" which the fusion axioms commit us to, for "these putative events lack any conceivable value to us in giving explanations [...] Inasmuch as it is in the nature of events to cause and to be caused, we expect individuals events to be members of kinds that pull their weight in illuminating accounts of how one thing followed another" [pp. 453-54]. Events differ from continuants, though, insofar as parthood has a clear spatial significance for continuants but not for events, ultimately because there is no matter, "no event stuff out of which occurrences are constructed" [p. 456].

1986b ‘Bodily Movements, Actions, and Mental Epistemology’, in P. A. French, T. Uehling, and H. K. Wettstein, eds., Studies in the Philosophy of Mind (Midwest Studies in Philosophy, Vol. X), Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 275-86.

Defends the view that the relation between an action and the corresponding bodily movement is causal--and that the agent’s body’s moving is not part of the agent’s moving her body--against the objection that this view implies that we do not see actions. Includes a more general discussion of the visibility of events.

1986c Review of Vermazen and Hintikka, eds. (1985), The Philosophical Quarterly, 36, 296-300.

A rebuttal of Wreen’s (1987) discussion of the ‘by’ locution. Reply in Wreen (1988).

1988 ‘Sartre and Action Theory’, Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, 48, 745-51.

Includes a defense of the view that actions are events and that a distinction between actions and movings does not distort the phenomenology of the agent’s perspective.

1993 ‘Agency and Causal Explanation’, in J. Heil and A. R. Mele, eds. (1993), pp. 161-88.

Argues for the view that actions are not accessible from the impersonal world of causes, even assuming that actions are events (Section 2) and that reason explanation is causal explanation (Section 3).

1995a ‘Action’, in T. Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 4-5.

1995b ‘Event’, in T. Honderich, ed., The Oxford Companion to Philosophy, Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, pp. 253-54.

1990 As Time Goes By. Tense and Universal Grammar, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press/Bradford Books.

A theory of natural language tense based on a revision of Reichenbach’s (1947) approach.

1986 Review of Barwise and Perry (1983), The Journal of Philosophy, 83, 168-84.

1987 Asymmetries in Time. Problems in the Philosophy of Science, Cambridge, MA, and London: MIT Press/Bradford Books.

Suggests that "the act one does owing to ignorance [...] is the result of some other causally related act which one believed himself to be doing" [p. 20]. Discussion in Jager (1967).

Huff, D., Turner, S.1981 ‘Rationalizations and the Application of Causal Explanations of Human Action’, American Philosophical Quarterly, 18, 213-20.

1994 ‘Essentiality of Origin and Individuation of Events’, The Philosophical Quarterly, 44, 26-44.

Argues against the view that events have their causes essentially (compare van Inwagen 1978a, 1983).

1971 ‘Nonlogical Necessity and C. J. Ducasse’, Ratio, 13, 119-38; reprinted in Beauchamp, ed. (1974), pp. 163-78.

1989 ‘Scientific Explanation: The Causes, Some of the Causes, Nothing but the Causes’, in P. Kitcher and W. S. Salmon, eds., Scientific Explanation [Minnesota Studies in the Philosophy of Science, Vol. XIII], Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, pp. 283-306.

Construes causal explanations employing an ontology à la Kim where events are taken "as concrete, specific entities, actual instantiations of or changes in worldly properties of a system, these properties being possessed by specific structures, themselves a part of the world, with these structures persisting through the change in properties which constitute an event" [p. 289]. In short: "An event is the possession of, or change in, a property of a system on a given occasion (trial)" [ibid.].

1962 ‘Time in the Earlier and Later Whitehead’, in D. R. Griffin, ed., Physics and the Ultimate Significance of Time, Albany: State University of New York Press, pp. 87-109.

1947/8 Spór o istnienie s wiata [The Controversy over the Existence of the World, in Polish], 2 vols., Kraków: Polskiej Akademii Umiejetnosci (Second Edition, Warszawa 1960); German edition published as Der Streit um die Existenz der Welt, 2 vols., Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1964/5; English Translation of parts of Vol. 1 in Time and Modes of Being (ed. H. R. Michejda), Springfield, IL: Thomas, 1960.

1991 ‘Actions and Movements’, in Proceedings of the 12th International Joint Conference on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI-91), Vol. 2, Sydney: IJCAI [Morgan Kaufmann], pp. 1061-65.

An account of actions as "content properties that agents have in virtue of (i) the bodily movements they effect and (ii) the wider circumstances in which those movements are effected" [p. 1061, Abstract]. Movements are viewed as concrete particulars.

Contents

Introduction

An Annotated Bibliography 1947 to 1997

A

B

C

D

E

F

G

H

I