In 'Brand on event identity', Michael Tye carefully presents my view on event identity, and raises some difficult questions. 1 This is the stuff of which philosohical dialectic is made. Tye's line of attack is to present a counterexample to my proposed identity conditions for events, and then to argue that one plausible reformulation is inconsistent with my particularist stand and that another plausible reformulation makes these conditions useless. Useful identity conditions, according to Tye, are those that enable us to judge how many events there are in fact in every situation. After some introductory remarks, I shall reply in the first section that Tye's initial reformulation of my proposed identity conditions is adequate to his example while being consistent with particularism. In the next section, I shall urge that his arguments for the uselessness of these conditions are unsound and, moreover, his view that usefulness is a requirement for identity conditions is mistaken. Finally, in the third section, I shall comment briefly on Tye's criticism of Davidson's particularistic event identity conditions.
I. IDENTITY CONDITIONS FOR EVENTS AND A PUTATIVE COUNTEREXAMPLE
I have argued on several occasions that events and material objects are simliar in that they are spatiotemporatly locatable and not literally repeatable. In one sense on the term, they are both particulars. Of course, events are not exactly the same as material objects. Two material objects cannot occupy a single spatiotemporal region, while two events can. This difference is reflected in their respective identity conditions, which can be formulated as follows: 2 (It) o1=o2 iff (s)(OlRS=-o2Rs) (I2) e =f iff [] (s) (ens -fRS),