β Scribed by William Carter
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
It is plausible that every thing is the subject of countlessly many events, and that every event has some thing, or perhaps some things, as its subject. With the possible exception of origin-events, it does not appear that individuals are essentially implicated in the events in which they are in fact implicated. (For example, Richard Nixon is implicated in the event wherein Nixon resigns as President; but it could have happened that Nixon did not resign as President.) It might appear that there is an asymmetry here, events being essentially tied to certain individuals. (For example, there is no possible world in which the event that is the resigning of Nixon as President occurs and someone other than Nixon does the resigning.) In the discussion that follows, it emerges that it is not generally true that an individual that is the subject of an event is essentially implicated in this event. An event can have one subject in one world and other subjects in other worlds. This leaves open the question whether an event can have one minimal subject in one world and other minimal subjects in other worlds. One challenge to minimal subject essentialism rests upon the conviction that events may not have unique minimal subjects. I will explain this in what follows, and suggest that there is reason to suspect that essentialism concerning events and their minimal subjects may require non-cosmetic revisions of orthodox modal intuitions bearing upon commonplace things. Do events have essences? There are familiar arguments, based upon essentialist premises, purporting to show that pains cannot be identified with activity of the brain. Such arguments are unsound if pains are events and events have no essence. This possibility is taken seriously by William G. Lyean: 9 Kripke's essentialist thesis is plausible for the case of sense-data and other putative mental objects, if anyone could show that such objects exist and thereby show
π SIMILAR VOLUMES