Bennett, Jonathan - Events and Their Names

According to good dictionaries, an "event" is "anything that happens; an incident or occurrence." So weddings and explosions are events, as are attacks of nostalgia, quarrels, avalanches, fights, fires, traffic jams, reconciliations, slumps, elections, strolls, births, deaths. Various as these are, they have enough in common for them all to count as events, and in recent years philosophers have turned their attention to this presumed common nature. They have wanted to know: What marks events off from other categories of existent--how do we tell the dancer from the dance? How do events relate to space and time? What is needed for two events to be parts of a single larger or fuller event? What is needed for a single event to have smaller or more abstract parts? Could we tell the whole truth about the universe without using the concept of an event? How does that concept figure in causal statements? What determines whether a pair of event descriptions could fit a single event?