Publication Details

Abstract

The aim of the paper is to present Davidson’s account of events and to show his semantic way of approaching this metaphysical issue. The author outlines Davidson’s views on action sentences and other parts of natural language, which led him to postulating a special variable for events, i.e. in event ontology. Second, the author gives a brief summary of the most important views presented in the discussion on events and their nature. On this background the uniqueness of Davidson’s approach is highlighted. Finally, the author emphasizes the difference between semantic and metaphysical approaches to events and argues that Davidson is primarily interested in the semantics of the natural language. His argumentation concerning the nature of events is based on the latter. In the author’s view this type of semantic approach to a metaphysical topic is one-sided and it may suffer from the shortcomings mentioned in conclusion.