This is something that I decided to try out. Everyday I am bothered by having to attend some courses that teach me nothing new when I leave the class. So I decided to do a summary everyday to reflect on what I learned during the day that’s actually new and worthy to learn. And they are the moments when I laugh a bit with epiphany.
1) Philosophers argue over how to reduce existence to a basic element in reality, like whether it can be treated as a property, and if so, what is its position in the hierarchy of all the properties that an object has.
2) There is a debate over what counts as property. Basically one school believes that there are plenty of properties (countably infinite) out there, and each sentence with a predicate assigns properties, without the need to consider the predicates’ significance, and they have an “abundance conception of properties.” Another one believes that properties are not that many! We gotta be economical in deciding whether something is a property, i.e., only those who truly categories a bunch of objects with their intrinsic features count. They have a sparse conception of properties.
3) Perdurantism vs endurantism. The former believes objects are 4-dimentional and each temporal picture of the 3-d object is a part in the objects entire existance. While the latter agrees to disagree. They believe objects are wholly present at all temporal points. Their objects are 3-d and don’t take time into consideration.
4) Derived from this, there is a perdurantist view on what an event is: they think event occurs if objects’ properties change over a period of time.
5) And based from this, there are a bunch of interesting quotes from both schools over event vs object. For example, Katherine Halway says, change is “the possession of different properties by different temporal parts of an object,” which links event to change, and, which links this concept to calculus in mathematics. For example, we can calculate an event’s intensity based on its first derivative.
6) Necessity vs contingency. These are properties of objects or events. Necessity means the existance/occurance is guaranteed and independently true of all circumstance; contingency means that is not guaranteed, caused and possible to be false.
7) Alright! So is there really a difference between objects and events? Can one merely treat them as the same entitiy? Yes! But first let’s look at the differences.
| Verb | Spacial Boundary | Temporal Boundary | location | Movablility | Persistence | |
| Object | Exist | Crisp | Vague | Located at a space | Yes | Endurance |
| Event | Occur | Vague | Crisp | Co-location is possible | No | Perdurance |
But they are treated as the same by some schools, because these two entities’s properties that are not under the same field are not diametrically apart from each other, but are comparative. They can overlap too. According to Nelson Goodman, an object is just a monotonous event and an event an unstable object (not the exact words). And Alfred North Whitehead also has a nice quote: endurance is the property of finding its pattern reproduced in the temporal parts of the total event.