Alexander P. D. Mourelatos

Events, processes, and states

The familiar Vendler-Kenny scheme of verb-types, viz., performances (further differentiated by Vedler into accomplishments and achievements), activities, and states, is too narrow in two important respects. First, it is narrow linguistically. It fails to take into account the phenomenon of verb aspect. The trichotomy is not one of verbs as lexical types but of predications. Second, the trichotomy is narrow ontologically. It is a specification in the context of human agency of the more fundamental, topic-neutral trichotomy, event-process-state.The central component in this ontological trichotomy, event, can be sharply differentiated from its two flanking components by adapting a suggestion by Geoffrey N. Leech and others that the contrast between perfective and imperfective aspect in verbs corresponds to the count/mass distinction in the domain of nouns. With the help of two distinctions, of “cardinal count” adverbials versus frequency adverbials, and of occurrence versus associated occasion, two interrelated criteria for event predication are developed. Accordingly, “Mary capsized the boat” is an event predication because (a) it is equivalent to “There was at least one capsizing of the boat by Mary,” or (b) because it admits cardinal count adverbials, e.g., “at least once,” “twice,” “three times.” Ontologically speaking, events are defined as those occurrences that are inherently countable.

Two Neo-Analytic Approaches to Parmenides’ Metaphysical-Cosmological Poem

These two important books, which have appeared five years apart within our immediately recent past, are connected – not merely by the fact of having been produced by the same publisher, rather – by a conceptually rich and intri guing matrix both of antithetical differences and of shared assumptions. And for reasons that will become clear presently, discussion of them can proceed best in the order reverse to that of their publication. (In furnishing page references, which will be mostly done within parentheses, I shall prefix the two authors’ initials – respectively, JP and MW.) Wedin’s book deals almost exclusively with just the central part of Parmenides’ didactic poem, from B2 to B8.49. For this sequence of texts, Wedin prefers, as the book’s subtitle indicates, the name “Way of Truth” (cf. MW, p. 1). But since Parmenides ostensibly uses alētheia, “truth”, in reference to the contents of this central part,1 I shall myself be using that simpler name, “Truth”, as title for the part at issue. The argumentation in “Truth” is laid out by Wedin in strict “regimentation” (a term that recurs frequently in the book),2 i. e., with deployment of the conceptual resources and notational devices of modern formal