Doing : an essay on causation, events, and action in the most general sense

Our world is populated not just by things, such as bombs, matches, and people, but also by events, like explosions, ignitions, and decisions. Part I, "Doings", is centered around my attempt to capture the nature of events. Events straddle the realms of thing and fact, eluding analysis, making this a difficult task. Yet it is an important one, because events play crucial roles in so many places: in philosophy of action and mind, in syntax and semantics, and particularly in metaphysics, where they are widely supposed to be the only true causes and effects. Part II, "Thing Causation", argues that the true causes are things. I first argue that previous theories have failed to capture the nature of events. Jaegwon Kim's well-known view takes every event to be associated with a triple of a thing, a repeatable that the thing instantiates, and a time of instantiation. Kim uses this one-to-one association to give existence and identity criteria for events.

Name thesis:degree_name

Doctoral

Department dc:contributor.department

Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Department of Linguistics and Philosophy

Grantor dc:publisher

Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Year dc:date.issued

2020

Author dc:creator

• Baron-Schmitt, Nathaniel.

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Bradford Skow.

• Linguistics and Philosophy.

Statement dc:rights

• MIT theses may be protected by copyright. Please reuse MIT thesis content according to the MIT Libraries Permissions Policy, which is available through the URL provided.

Licence dc:rights.uri

• http://dspace.mit.edu/handle/1721.1/7582

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/1721.1/129123

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:dspace.mit.edu:1721.1/129123