Merab Mamardashvili’s philosophy can be defined as the philosophy of the transcendent event. An event is at once extremely concrete and extremely abstract. It occurs in an act of a special kind: an autonomous act which is not the realization of any pattern of transcendental historicity, is not attached to any teleology, that is, its meaning does not consist in the realization of a goal. It is, plainly speaking, purposeless and therefore indeterminate. However, this is not a variety (...) of actionism, not an outburst of absurdity subverting all order. An act turns out to be the realization of the “ontological abstraction of order” by means of a symbol actualized by the very event of the act. The article examines various aspects of the event from the aesthetic to the meta-historical. (shrink)

I suggest in this article that there are several aspects of the Lacanian Real that so-called Lacanian literature has not adequately addressed, or barely did so. In this pursuit, I present a deconstructing reading of a number of Lacanian texts. My deconstructive reading suggests that three key features characterize the literature on the Real. First, there always is resistance that is involved in thinking about, and in experiencing the effects of, the Real. Second, the Real is most characteristically thought of (...) in negative terms. Third, the Real is more or less thought of as a limit that cannot be transgressed. A deconstruction of these features leads to two arguments. First, I propose that the deployment of the Real as khôra within a discourse is an originary performativity which speaks of retroactively positing of a have-always-been-there Real. Second, I argue that the Real is the impossible–possible event which is at the heart of ‘saying the Real’. The deconstruction thus leads to a reconfiguration of the Real as a ‘ saying the Real (as khôra)’ qua event (in the sense of Derrida) in the discourse. (shrink)

Our chapter interrogates the conditions that give rise to the possibility of the Event and proposes a Lacanian-Badiouian perspective to think through conditions for the truth procedures of love and politics. First, we situate the Event, Possibility and Truth in both Badiou and Lacan, which brings forward conceptual tensions between truth and knowledge as presented in the psychoanalytic act. We propose with Badiou and Lacan that the emergence of possibility follows a logic that rupture compulsive repetition and whose (...) effect is precisely the Event which results in knowledge of a savoir faire, of transmissible quality, that grant re-inscription (a new writing of the necessary) and/or a partial inscription of the impossible. The notion of love as beyond narcissism, allows us to discuss how to reimagine politics anew, including approaching it through the problem of ecology. (shrink)

ABSTRACTMobilizing Foucault’s genealogy, this article investigates how an “ethics event”—the involvement by some sell-side financial analysts in the United States and United Kingdom across the past two decades in corporate governance—emerged. It is found that the complex relations formed between specific historical precedents, normative discourses, and fields of power rendered certain issues in financial markets morally problematic and constructed analysts’ corporate governance work as a potential solution. Contributing to research in finance ethics, this article develops a novel perspective to (...) conceptualize the rise of ethically relevant practices in financial markets, focusing on how ethical problems and their solutions are outcomes of discursive construction and power relations. This article also revises our understanding of the boundary between technical norms and moral norms in financial markets. When ethical crises occur, it is argued, transforming technical practices and revising the technical norms adopted by financial professionals has the potential to tackle ethical concerns. (shrink)

We have entered a new era of nature. What remains of the frontiers of modern thought that divided the living from the inert, subjectivity from objectivity, the apparent from the real, value from fact, and the human from the nonhuman? Can the great oppositions that presided over the modern invention of nature still claim any cogency? In _Nature as Event_, Didier Debaise shows how new narratives and cosmologies are necessary to rearticulate that which until now had been separated. Following William (...) James and Alfred North Whitehead, Debaise presents a pluralistic approach to nature. What would happen if we attributed subjectivity and potential to all beings, human and nonhuman? Why should we not consider aesthetics and affect as the fabric that binds all existence? And what if the senses of importance and value were no longer understood to be exclusively limited to the human? (shrink)

Compatibilists believe that moral responsibility and causal determinism are compatible. Incompatibilists, on the other hand, believe that if causal determinism is true, then no agent is morally responsible for her actions. The principle of alternative possibilities, or PAP, claims that an agent is morally responsible for an action only if she could have done other than the action in question. In a landmark article, Harry Frankfurt attempts to advance the compatibilist's position by arguing that the principle of alternative possibilities is (...) false. To demonstrate the falsity of PAP, Frankfurt describes a scenario in which an agent appears to have no alternative possibilities yet is still morally responsible. This scenario and others like it have come to be called Frankfurt-style counterexamples, or FSCs. ;One prominent incompatibilist response to FSCs is to argue that, despite Frankfurt's argument, FSCs do not in fact undermine PAP. Many incompatibilists argue that, contrary to Frankfurt's claim, the agent in an FSC still has relevant alternative possibilities. According to some of these incompatibilists, the actual and alternate sequences of an FSC contain numerically distinct events which can serve as the relevant alternatives. Of course, such a response depends upon one's metaphysic of events and their individuation. In this dissertation, I explore the implications of various accounts of event-individuation for the debate surrounding the success of FSCs and their purported repudiation of PAP. I survey the dominant theories of events and their individuation and raise a number of objections to these extant theories. I then develop a property-exemplification view of events and their individuation, situated within a larger Aristotelian metaphysic that avoids these criticisms. I then examine the effect this account has for the debate surrounding FSCs. (shrink)

International relations constitute a purely intersubjective field. Its actors, objects and meanings have no self-standing “objectivity” in a narrow sense. As such, the IR theorisation for conducting studies on the IR phenomena and events lacks the anchor of the independent objectivity which the positive sciences enjoy. The IR theorisation consequently relies on its own preceding world-views, interpretative frameworks and narratives, which become genetic acts, creating an ontological complication. In doing so, the IR theorisation tends to bend, alter and occasionally omit (...) the pre-theoretical, immediate and intersubjective givenness of the IR phenomena and events. Also, the theory’s narrative on the phenomena and events needs to include the narrative of their genesis, which are imposed upon their immediate, therefore post-genetic givenness, causing a temporal distortion. Still, there might be a possibility to study them as they are given, avoiding these complications. The Husserlian phenomenology provides this endeavour with fundamental concepts and tools that are related to intersubjectivity, temporality and access to the immediacy of the givenness of the phenomena and events. However, the Husserlian phenomenology itself has also a tendency to relapse into the complications of theorising, in particular due to its “genetic” proposals. Yet, these are “remediable” under the light of the Heideggerian criticism on the matters of intersubjectivity, temporality and the nature of the immediate, “innerworldy” givenness. In other words, the phenomenology, with contributions of the Heideggerian phenomenological-ontology, may effectively provide the IR studies with ways to approach the IR phenomena and events in their pre-theoretical, immediate, intersubjective, authentic givenness. Keywords: phenomenology, international relations, international relations theory. (shrink)

Theories of explanation in the social sciences vacillate between holism and individualism. This book contends that this has been a consequence of theories of rationality which assume that rationality requires coherent theories to be shown to be true. It claims that traditional explanations place unrealistic demands on individuals and institutions.

Dynamic events such as a rolling ball moving from one place to another involve change and time intervals and thus presumably successions of static events occurring one after the other, e.g., the ball’s being at a certain place and then at another place during the interval in question. When dynamic events are experienced they should count as present and thus as existent from a presentist point of view. But this seems to imply the existence of the static events involved in (...) them. This in turn seems to imply that there exist past and perhaps even future static events. Therefore, there is a problem for presentism. A possible way out for the presentist is proposed, based on allowing for time-indexed past-oriented and future-oriented properties. One may raise objections regarding the ontological status of these properties and the commitment to past and future objects and times that they seem to bring with them, but these objections can be put to rest. (shrink)

An 'Event' can refer to a devastating natural disaster or to the latest celebrity scandal, the triumph of the people or a brutal political change, an intense experience of a work of art or an intimate decision... An event is the effect that seems to exceed its causes--and the space of an event is the distance of an effect from its causes. But, asks Slavoj Žižek, does everything that exists have to be grounded in sufficient reasons? Or (...) are there things that somehow happen out of nowhere? How can philosophy help us to determine what an event is and how it is possible?"--Page [4] of cover. (shrink)

This study investigated whether ruminating on an intrusive thought before sleeping led to an increased likelihood of dreaming of threatening events. One hundred and forty-six participants were randomly assigned to a rumination condition and a control condition. Participants completed a dream diary upon waking. The result showed that presleep ruminating on an intrusive thought increased the frequency of both threatening dreams and negative emotions in dreams. In addition, dreams with threatening events were more emotional and negative than dreams without threatening (...) events. These results may support the threat simulation theory of dreaming. In addition, these results may give some insight into a mathematical model for the continuity hypothesis of dreaming. (shrink)

Many philosophers are persuaded by familiar arguments that free will is incompatible with causal determinism. Yet, notoriously, past attempts to articulate how the right type of indeterminism might secure the capacity for autonomous action have generally been regarded as either demonstrably inadequate or irremediably obscure. This volume gathers together the most significant recent discussions concerning the prospects for devising a satisfactory indeterministic account of freedom of action. These essays give greater precision to traditional formulations of the problems associated with indeterministic (...) accounts and to the range of theoretical avenues for pursuing resolutions. The first four essays set out different challenges (from both compatibilists and those skeptical of the possibility of free will) to the adequacy of standard indeterministic theories. The next seven essays meet one or more of these challenges. Each of the fundamental types of approach--simple indeterminism, causal indeterminism, and agent causation--is represented in these novel and sophisticated proposals. The collection finishes with two essays that debate whether compatibilism entails that freedom of choice is a comparatively rare phenomenon within an individual's life. Eloquently presenting some of the most compelling and accessible arguments surrounding this central philosophical issue, Agents, Causes, and Events makes a valuable contribution to courses in free will/action theory and metaphysics. (shrink)

Volume 31, Issue 4, December 2017, Page 427-429.

There is growing evidence that individuals with social anxiety show impaired cortisol recovery after experiencing social evaluative stressors. Yet, little is known regarding the cognitive processes underlying such impaired cortisol recovery. The present study examined the effect of post-event processing (PEP), referred to as repetitive thinking about social situations, on cortisol recovery following a social stressor. Forty-two non-clinical university students (23 women, 19 men, mean age = 22.0 ± 2.0 years) completed the Trier Social Stress Test (TSST), followed by (...) a thought sampling procedure which assessed the frequency of PEP reflecting the TSST. A growth curve model showed PEP and social anxiety interactively predicted cortisol recovery. In particular, PEP predicted impaired cortisol recovery in those with low levels of social anxiety but not in those with high levels of social anxiety, which contradicted the initial hypothesis. These findings suggest that PEP is differentially associated with cortisol recovery depending on levels of social anxiety. The possible mechanisms underlying these findings were discussed in terms of protective inhibition framework. (shrink)

Thomas Reid offers an explanation of how memory of events is possible. This paper presents, criticize,s and amends his view that memory not only preserves our knowledge of the external world, but also contributes to such knowledge, by being essential for the perception of events. Reid’s views on memory are in line with his generalanti-skeptical commitments, and thus attractive, for several reasons. One reason is that, just like perception, memory is not infallible, but it can constitute or, at least, (...) ground knowledge. Reid argues that memory, like perception, is immediate: it gives direct access to the external world, and not to mental representations of the external world. Another reason is that Reid’s explanation of how memory of events works emphasizes the impor- tance of the divide between memory and perception and consciousness: it is one thing to perceive or be conscious of something; it is another to remember that thing. Despite these advantages, a careful study of Reid’s views on memory will uncover a serious problem of general philosophical interest: it is unclear how exactly we are able to remember events episodically, since it is not settled whether we ever literally perceive events. This problem is engendered by a clash of the following two intuitions: (i) we can perceive only presently existing things, and (ii) we can remember events, which usually span periods of time longer than the present (whether the present is durationless or not). (shrink)

This paper discusses the possibility of a metaphysical event theory that incorporates the concept of hope as a disposition. Hope is interp- reted as an expectation regarding future events while representing certain manifestations expected to occur in certain future events. In this sense, for ontologies that deny change or claim that its degree is purely fundamental, hope is a redundant concept in a metaphysical context. Additionally, in a world governed by fatalism or theological determinism it is meaningless to hope (...) for an alternative result. These two interpretations are compatible with a form of Stoicism as they depict a world where hope is redundant. To make hope more meaningful within the framework of event theory, we can propose an alternative view in which hope is considered not merely a psychological pheno- menon but also related and more active to metaphysical events. To strengthen this relation, we will change our perspective on our feature ontology and argue that what is hoped for can exist as a dispositional property that is realized as a particular consequence of an event, when it encounters certain stimuli. In examining the relationship between hope and event theory from different ontological perspectives, the first two view hope as a redundant concept for event theories. In contrast, the third perspective reinterprets hope as a disposition, making it more significant for a fundamental ontology. (shrink)

The aim of the article is to present a model of causal relations that is based on what is known about human causal reasoning and that forms guidelines for implementations in robots. I argue for two theses concerning human cognition. The first is that human causal cognition, in contrast to that of other animals, is based on the understanding of the forces that are involved. The second thesis is that humans think about causality in terms of events. I present a (...) two-vector model of events, developed by Gärdenfors and Warglien, which states that an event is represented in terms of two main components – the force of an action that drives the event, and the result of its application. Apart from the causal mapping, the event model contains representations of a patient, an agent, and possibly some other roles. Agents and patients are objects (animate or inanimate) that have different properties. Following my theory of conceptual spaces, they can be described as vectors of property values. At least two spaces are needed to describe an event, an action space and a result space. The result of an event is modeled as a vector representing the change of properties of the patient before and after the event. In robotics the focus has been on describing results. The proposed model also includes the causal part of events, typically described as an action. A central part of an event category is the mapping from actions to results. This mapping contains the central information about causal relations. In applications of the two-vector model, the central problem is how the event mapping can be learned in a way that is amenable to implementations in robots. Three processes are central for event cognition: causal thinking, control of action and learning by generalization. Although it is not yet clear which is the best way to model how the mappings can be learned, they should be constrained by three corresponding mathematical properties: monotonicity (related to qualitative causal thinking); continuity (plays a key role in activities of action control); and convexity (facilitates generalization and the categorization of events). I argue that Bayesian models are not suitable for these purposes, but some more geometrically oriented approach to event mappings should be used. (shrink)

Description Logics (DLs) are a family of formal knowledge representation formalisms and the most well-known formalisms in semantics-based systems. The central focus of this research is on logical-terminological characterisation/analysis of possibilistic and probabilistic descriptions of events in DLs. Based on a logical characterisation of the concept of `being', this paper conceptualises events within DLs world descriptions. Accordingly, it deals with the concepts of `possibility of events' and `probability of events'. The main goal of this research is to investigate how (...) class='Hi'>possible and probable notations can, terminologically and logically, be interpreted and analysed within DLs world descriptions. In other words, the research logically-terminologically investigates how possibilistic and probabilistic descriptions of events can be expressed in DLs. (shrink)

Event concepts are unstructured atomic concepts that apply to event types. A paradigm example of such an event type would be that of diaper changing, and so a putative example of an atomic event concept would be DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER.1 I will defend two claims about such concepts. First, the conceptual claim that it is in principle possible to possess a concept such as DADDY'S-CHANGING-MY-DIAPER without possessing the concept DIAPER. Second, the empirical claim that we actually possess (...) such concepts and that they play an important role in our cognitive lives. The argument for the empirical claim has the form of an inference to the best explanation and is aimed at those who are already willing to attribute concepts and beliefs to infants and nonhuman animals. Many animals and prelinguistic infants seem capable of re-identifying event-types in the world, and they seem to store information about things happening at particular times and places. My account offers a plausible model of how such organisms are able to do this without attributing linguistically structured mental states to them. And although language allows adults to form linguistically structured mental representations of the world, there is no good reason to think that such structured representations necessarily replace the unstructured ones. There is also no good reason for a philosopher who is willing to explain the behavior of an organism by appealing to atomic concepts of individuals or kinds to not use a similar form of explanation when explaining the organism's capacity to recognize events. -/- We can form empirical concepts of individuals, kinds, properties, event-types, and states of affairs, among other things, and I assume that such concepts function like what François Recanati calls ‘mental files’ or what Ruth Millikan calls ‘substance concepts’ (Recanati 2012; Millikan 1999, 2000, 2017). To possess such a concept one must have a reliable capacity to re-identify the object in question, but this capacity of re-identification does not fix the reference of the concept. Such concepts allow us to collect and utilize useful information about things that we re-encounter in our environment. We can distinguish between a perception-action system and a perception-belief system, and I will argue that empirical concepts, including atomic event concepts, can play a role in both systems. The perception-action system involves the application of concepts in the service of (often skilled) action. We can think of the concept as a mental file containing motor-plans that can be activated once the individual recognizes that they are in a certain situation. In this way, recognizing something (whether an object or an event) as a token of a type, plays a role in guiding immediate action. The perception-belief system, in contrast, allows for the formation of beliefs that can play a role in deliberation and planning and in the formation of expectations. I distinguish between two particular types of belief which I call where-beliefs and when-beliefs, and I argue that we can model the formation of such perceptual beliefs in nonlinguistic animals and human infants in terms of the formation of a link between an empirical concept and a position on a cognitive map. According to the account offered, seemingly complex beliefs, such as a baby's belief that Daddy changed her diaper in the kitchen earlier, will not be linguistically structured. If we think that prelinguistic infants possess such concepts and are able to form such beliefs, it is likely that adults do too. The ability to form such beliefs does not require the capacity for public language, and we can model them in nonlinguistic terms; thus, we have no good reason to think of such beliefs as propositional attitudes. Of course, we can use sentences to refer to such beliefs, and thus it is possible to think of such beliefs as somehow relations to propositions. But it is not clear to me what is gained by this as we have a perfectly good way to think about the structure of such beliefs that does not involve any appeal to language. (shrink)

This paper proposes a conceptual framework of multiversional narrative processing, or multiversionality. Multiversionality is the consideration of multiple possible event sequences for an incomplete narrative during reception, from reading a novel to listening to the story of a friend’s day. It occurs naturally and is experienced in a wide range of cases, such as suspense, surprise, counterfactuals, and detective stories. Receiving a narrative, we propose, is characterized by the spontaneous creation of competing interpretive models of the narrative that (...) are then used to create predictions and projections for the narrative’s future. These predictions serve as a mechanism for integrating incoming information and updating the narrative model through prediction error, without completely eliminating past versions. We define this process as having three aspects: (1) constrained expectations, (2) preference projection, and (3) causal extrapolation. Constrained expectations and preference projections respectively create the bounds and subjective desires for a narrative’s progress, while causal extrapolation builds, reworks, and maintains the potential models for understanding the narrative. We offer multiversionality as a novel framework for thinking about narrative, social cognition, and decision making that presents adaptive benefits and future directions for empirical study. (shrink)

À l’instar d’Humpty Dumpty, le personnage de Lewis Carroll qui fête son non-anniversaire 364 jours par an, Bergson semble inscrire la discontinuité de l’événement dans la continuité de la durée. Il invite son lecteur à concevoir la nouveauté comme la trame du réel. Rien ne se répète jamais à l’identique, chaque événement est singulier et s’inscrit dans un temps irréversible. Pourtant, l’intelligence ne perçoit pas toujours cette « création continue d’imprévisible nouveauté » car elle immobilise et spatialise le réel en (...) le rendant homogène. Mais dès lors que l’esprit retrouve le caractère temporel de la réalité, le présent apparaît comme toujours inédit. Vu sous cet angle, la définition bergsonienne de l’événement semble donner au banal les caractéristiques de l’exceptionnel. Les non-anniversaires possèderaient la même consistance ontologique que les anniversaires sans pour autant disparaître dans l’homogénéité de la répétition quotidienne. L’événement serait à la fois une aspérité surgissant dans le flux de la durée et en même temps l’expression de la plus pure continuité. Pour résoudre cette apparente contradiction il faut alors se demander : comment Bergson réussit-il à concilier la nouveauté de l’événement avec la continuité de la durée? Pour répondre à cette question, nous montrerons comment Bergson introduit des différences qualitatives au sein de la continuité du devenir. Ces différences s’expriment à travers plusieurs niveaux de réalité que l’article étudie successivement. Nous partons de la métaphysique bergsonienne de la durée, capable de donner à l’événement un contenu réel et pas seulement représentatif. Grâce à l’épaisseur du devenir, l’événement se relie à la continuité spirituelle de la durée tout en conservant son caractère inédit et imprévisible. Son hétérogénéité le distingue de la pure discontinuité du fiat lux et de l’homogénéité mécaniste. La causalité des événements se révèle différente du simple mécanisme. Dans la seconde partie de l’article nous tirons les conséquences de cette métaphysique pour les appliquer à l’événement étudié sous l’angle de l’histoire. Partant d’un réexamen des apories du possible, nous examinons la valeur de l’uchronie pour ensuite décrire la manière dont Bergson théorise la connaissance historique et l’action des grands hommes. (shrink)

The Choquet expected utility model deals with nonadditive probabilities (or capacities). Their dependence on the information the decision-maker has about the possibility of the events is taken into account. Two kinds of information are examined: interval information (for instance, the percentage of white balls in an urn is between 60% and 100%) and comparative information (for instance, the information that there are more white balls than black ones). Some implications are shown with regard to the core of the capacity and (...) to two additive measures which can be derived from capacities: the Shapley value and the nucleolus. Interval information bounds prove to be satisfied by all probabilities in the core, but they are not necessarily satisfied by the nucleolus (when the core is empty) and the Shapley value. We must introduce the constrained nucleolus in order for these bounds to be satisfied, while the Shapley value does not seem to be adjustable. On the contrary, comparative information inequalities prove to be not necessarily satisfied by all probabilities in the core and we must introduce the constrained core in order for these inequalities be satisfied. However, both the nucleolus and the Shapley value satisfy the comparative information inequalities, and the Shapley value does it more strictly than the nucleolus. (shrink)

In the same way that it is possible - by a loosely specified class of more or less well accepted statements - to know the referent of an ordinary proper name, we can understand a name like "the Renaissance." But names of events and periods have an indeterminacy not shared by names of men; with holistic names, the criteria of identity for the kind of thing are fluid, while the analogous criteria for being a man are not. Despite this (...) indeterminacy, the conceptualization of events and periods is useful in historical inquiry, where general statements about events, periods, and institutions can be reconciled with statements about particular facts, and with the evidence. Holistic terms cannot reasonably be prohibited on philosophical grounds; their legitimate use is a problem historians must judge case by case. (shrink)

How do modal expressions determine which possibilities they range over? According to the Modal Anchor Hypothesis (Kratzer in _The language-cognition interface: Actes du 19_ _e_ _congrès international des linguistes_, Libraire Droz, Genève, 179–199, 2013 ), modal expressions determine their domain of quantification from particulars (events, situations, or individuals). This paper presents novel evidence for this hypothesis, focusing on a class of Spanish relative clauses that host verbs inflected in the subjunctive. Subjunctive in Romance is standardly taken to be licensed only (...) in a subset of intensional contexts. However, in our relative clauses, subjunctive is exceptionally licensed in extensional contexts. At the same time, the interpretation of these relative clauses still involves modality, a type of modality that targets the goals of the agent of the main event. We argue that the pattern displayed by these relative clauses follows straightforwardly if subjunctive is associated with a modal operator that, like modal indefinites (Alonso-Ovalle and Menéndez-Benito in _Journal of Semantics_ 35(1):1–41, 2017 ), can project its domain from a volitional event. Overall, our proposal supports the event-based analysis of mood (Kratzer in Evidential mood in attitude and speech reports. Talk delivered at the 1st Syncart Workshop, Siena, July 13, 2016 ; Portner and Rubinstein in _Natural Language Semantics_ 28:343–393, 2020 ) and extends its application beyond attitudinal and modal complements. (shrink)

Throughout all of Deleuze’s work one finds an extended encounter with the Event of Difference. Deleuze’s extraordinary work on Leibniz is no exception. In the ‘later’ work, and regarding Leibniz, Deleuze remarks, “no philosophy has ever pushed to such an extreme the affirmations of one and the same world, and of an infinite difference and variety in this world”. This positive identification with Leibniz is not found in the ‘earlier’ wave of Deleuzian texts from the sixties where Leibniz is (...) captured hesitating over the possible and the virtual. Any such hesitation over the possible and the virtual is “disastrous” for a philosophy of the event and difference since it abolishes the reality of the virtual and subordinates it to the identical, replacing pure immanence with a ‘theological model’ of creation. Is the Leibniz of Deleuze’s early texts compossible with the later? What is the significance of the event of difference or fold that joins and separates Deleuze’s continuing encounter with Leibniz? We will examine what is at stake in these differing understandings of Leibniz to Deleuze’s philosophy of events of difference. (shrink)

Contemporary philosophy, from Kant through Bergson and Husserl to Heidegger, has assumed that time must be conceived as a fundamental determination of the subject: Time is not first in things but arises from actions, attitudes, or comportments through which a subject temporalizes mtime, expecting or remembering, anticipating the future or making a decision. Event and Time traces the genesis of this thesis through detailed, rigorous analyses of the philosophy of time in Plato, Aristotle, and Augustine, ultimately showing that, in (...) the development of metaphysics, the understanding of the temporal phenomenon as an inner-temporal phenomenon has made possible time's subjectivization. The book goes on to argue that time is in fact not thinkable according to metaphysical subjectivity. Instead, the guiding thread for the analysis of time must shift to the eventual hermeneutics of the human being, first developed in Event and World, and now deepened and completed in Event and Time. Romano's diptych makes a compelling, rigorous, and original philosophical contribution to the thinking of the event. (shrink)

Spontaneous intrusive recollections follow traumatic events in clinical and non-clinical populations. To determine whether any relationship exists between SIRs and enhanced memory for emotional events, participants viewed emotional or neutral films, had their memory for the films tested two days later, and estimated the number of SIRs they experienced for each film. SIR frequency related positively to memory strength, an effect more pronounced in the emotional condition. These findings represent the first demonstration of a relationship between SIRs occurring after an (...) emotional experience and subsequent memory strength for that experience. The results are consistent with the possibility that emotional arousal leads both to elevated SIR frequency and better memory, and that the covert rehearsal associated with SIRs enhances memory for emotional relative to neutral stimuli. Additional evidence of menstrual cycle influences on SIR incidence in female participants appears to merit consideration in future work. (shrink)

In relativistic quantum field theory the notion of a local operation is regarded as basic: each open space-time region is associated with an algebra of observables representing possible measurements performed within this region. It is much more difficult to accommodate the notions of events taking place in such regions or of localized objects. But how can the notion of a local operation be basic in the theory if this same theory would not be able to represent localized measuring devices (...) and localized events? After briefly reviewing these difficulties we discuss a strategy for eliminating the tension, namely by interpreting quantum theory in a realist way. To implement this strategy we use the ideas of the modal interpretation of quantum mechanics. We then consider the question of whether the resulting scheme can be made Lorentz invariant. (shrink)

This paper defends the claim that the critique of ideology requires creative interventions in the symbolic order of society and that those creative interventions must be understood as events. This is what animates the work of both Ricoeur and Deleuze and yet helps to uncover the fundamental difference between them regarding the conditions that make such critique possible: a difference regarding how we understand the nature of events. While Ricoeur is the philosopher of the narrated event, Deleuze is (...) the philosopher of the dramatic event. Instead of pursuing a point-by-point comparison of their respective philosophies of the event, a line of social and political inquiry is constructed that leads from Ricoeur to Deleuze with a view to establishing at what point these two thinkers take different paths. It will be argued that the crossroads is rather neatly signposted by Meillassoux’s critique of strong correlationism in After Finitude .  . (shrink)

This study explores the pivotal concept of “objective possibility” within Lukács’s History and Class Consciousness, a concept that has received less attention compared to more prominent ideas such as reification or totality. Lukács frequently refers to “objective possibility” and related terms in essays like “What Is Orthodox Marxism?” and “Class Consciousness,” emphasizing its importance in understanding class consciousness theoretically. The term’s roots for Lukács derive from Max Weber’s methodological writings, which drew from John Stuart Mill and Johannes von Kries and (...) applied to historical and social causation. However, Lukács diverges from Weber’s use, focusing not on counterfactual historical events but on latent historical tensions in the present that can be actualized through collective action. The study argues that Lukács integrates Weberian objective possibility with Marxist and Hegelian language, utilizing it within a modal social ontology. This approach allows Lukács to theorize key questions of class consciousness, historical action, and revolution. By drawing on Hegel’s dialectics of possibility, actuality, and necessity, as well as Marxian contradictions in material conditions, Lukács reconfigures objective possibility from a heuristic tool for the writing of history to an ontologically significant element in the field of historical action. (shrink)

This study explored the syntactic transfer effect of the non-local subject-verb agreement structure with plural head noun after two intensive phases of input training with event-related potentials (ERP). The non-local subject-verb agreement stimuli with the plural head nouns, which never appeared in training phases, were used for the stimuli. A total of 26 late L1-Chinese L2-English learners, who began to learn English after a critical period and participated in our previous experiments, were asked back to take part in this (...) syntactic transfer experiment. Results indicated that a significant ERP component P600 occurred in the key region (the verb) of the sentences with syntactic violations in the experimental group, but none occurred in the control group. This demonstrated that there was a significant transfer effect of the input training. The possible theoretical explanation was provided and also the malleability of the late L2 learners was discussed. (shrink)

This paper presents a set-theoretical conceptual framework for theorizing about (possible) events , and states some analytical and synthetical principles which describe the way in which the concept of reality (or actuality ) applies to them. The conceptual framework has few primitives, but is nevertheless of great definitional power; the demonstration of this will fill the first part of the paper.

Word co‐occurrence patterns in language corpora contain a surprising amount of conceptual knowledge. Large language models (LLMs), trained to predict words in context, leverage these patterns to achieve impressive performance on diverse semantic tasks requiring world knowledge. An important but understudied question about LLMs’ semantic abilities is whether they acquire generalized knowledge of common events. Here, we test whether five pretrained LLMs (from 2018's BERT to 2023's MPT) assign a higher likelihood to plausible descriptions of agent−patient interactions than to minimally (...) different implausible versions of the same event. Using three curated sets of minimal sentence pairs (total n = 1215), we found that pretrained LLMs possess substantial event knowledge, outperforming other distributional language models. In particular, they almost always assign a higher likelihood to possible versus impossible events (The teacher bought the laptop vs. The laptop bought the teacher). However, LLMs show less consistent preferences for likely versus unlikely events (The nanny tutored the boy vs. The boy tutored the nanny). In follow‐up analyses, we show that (i) LLM scores are driven by both plausibility and surface‐level sentence features, (ii) LLM scores generalize well across syntactic variants (active vs. passive constructions) but less well across semantic variants (synonymous sentences), (iii) some LLM errors mirror human judgment ambiguity, and (iv) sentence plausibility serves as an organizing dimension in internal LLM representations. Overall, our results show that important aspects of event knowledge naturally emerge from distributional linguistic patterns, but also highlight a gap between representations of possible/impossible and likely/unlikely events. (shrink)

Contents: POSSIBLE ONTOLOGIES. Jacek Juliusz JADACKI: Preface. Book I: Zdzis??l??aw AUGUSTYNEK: Point Eventism. An Outline of a Certain Ontology. Book II: Jacek Juliusz JADACKI: Ontological Minimum. DISCUSSIONS. Katarzyna PAPRZYCKA: Carnap and Leibniz on the Problem of Being. Piotr PRZYBYSZ: Polish Discussions about Reism.

John Dewey’s naturalism requires viewing nature and experience from the perspective of holism, emphasising the continuity between these two. To Dewey, nature is not a fixed entity, but an event in an ongoing process of unfolding. The temporality of an event can meet Dewey’s requirement of constructing a philosophical notion about change and development. The event has a relatively stable structure. The continuity between living things and non-living things becomes possible because of the characteristic transactions of (...) events, and experience thus becomes something emergent in nature and actively intervenes in its unfolding. The emergence of human intelligence and the application of language has lifted nature to a controllable and operable plane, making experience a crucial guide for the unfolding of nature. (shrink)

Abstract: The following is an outline of an emerging foundation for science that begins to explain living forms and their patterns of movement beyond the sphere of mechanistic interactions. Employing an event ontology based on a convergence of quantum physics and Alfred North Whitehead’s process philosophy, coupled with the controversial yet promising theory of formative causation, this development will explore possible influences on the outcomes of events beyond any combination of external forces, laws of Nature, and chance. If (...) it turns out there are no such additional influences--beyond mechanistic causes--it is difficult to see how agency or free will could exist. Assuming agency exists, as Whitehead apparently does, while committing to an event ontology in which process is fundamental leads to interesting questions about the natures of any entities that might participate in events. Furthermore, what might the purposes and agendas of such entities be based upon, beyond memory traces or DNA code? This ontological model, recognizing processes as fundamental, leads to a revised cosmology where the trajectory of a series of events may be due to more than rearrangement of material bits according to external forces and where goal-directed, recurring processes and the emergence of mind are not so surprising. Just as special relativity reduces to classical treatment when speeds slow down, this scientific model for a living world reduces to mechanistic materialism whenever conditions are more limited. Though this development is based on a philosophy of process, there are some dissimilarities with respect to Whitehead’s particular version. (shrink)

Appraisal theories predict that emotional experiences are tightly linked to context appraisals. However, depressed people tend to perceive a variety of emotional events more negatively and stressfully and their emotional experience has been described as context insensitive. This raises the question: how different is the intensity of context appraisals from related emotion experiences among depressed relative to healthy people? Surprisingly, we do not know how cohesive intensity of context appraisals and emotional experiences are in depression. In this study, we assessed (...) differences in intensity of context appraisals and emotional experiences across 1634 daily events during three days within and between depressed participants (N = 41) and healthy controls (N = 33) using linear mixed models. Models compared intensities of stressfulness and unpleasantness appraisals to the intensity of negative affect, and intensity of pleasantness appraisals to the intensity of positive affect. Our findings partially supported our predictions of lower cohesiveness in depression: while intensities of pleasantness appraisals and positive affect were more alike among control participants, intensities of unpleasantness and stressfulness appraisals were more similar to the intensities of negative affect in the depressed group. Current work suggests that hedonic dysfunction in depression is possibly driven by a loosely tied positive context appraisal-emotion experience process. (shrink)

ABSTRACT In a number of his later works, Derrida makes reference to the concept of the “event.” However, unlike for many of the other concepts developed in this phase of his writing, we do not find one “basic” or “primary” text in which he develops the logic of the concept. We find him alluding to it in different contexts and making use of it in certain ways, but, at least with this concept, he leaves much of the philosophical “work” (...) to readers. The aim of this article is to elucidate Derrida's concept of the event, to lay out as clearly as possible the way in which the concept functions. In the first part, I go through the logic, working out step by step what makes an “event worthy of the name”. In the second part, I deal with the paradoxes that arise when we ask how it is possible to say anything about an event, how one might go about constructing a “name worthy of the event.”. (shrink)

The article draws attention to a certain multi-layered parallel between Nietzsche and Badiou’s theory of the event, which the author argues Badiou evaded by a kind of strategic relocation. The article does not focus so much on (and certainly not against) Badiou’s philosophy, but attempts to assess the possible implications of this relocation for Badiou’s interpretation of Nietzsche. In the first part of the article, the key concepts of Badiou’s account of Nietzsche are introduced, such as “archi-politics”, “antiphilosophy”, (...) and the “event Nietzsche”. Later, it is shown that, despite some fundamental differences, there is a strong resemblance between some key concepts of Badiou’s theory of the event, especially those related to the notion of “intervention”, and some concepts found in Nietzsche. Finally, the paper focuses on the problem of the “death of God”, which is somehow absent in Badiou’s interpretation, even though the term itself resonates strongly in various aspects of Badiou’s philosophy. (shrink)