Whitehead’s Theory of Events

Abstract

In 1926 Tarski brought to my attention both the conception of ‘events’ developed in 1919 by Whitehead in his interesting book An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Natural Knowledge, and its relation with my ‘general class theory’ ... Noting the relationship of Whitehead’s theses (i)–(vi)^[1] ... to his remaining theses about ‘events, Tarski expressed the belief that neither of Whitehead’s theses ‘If every intersector of b also intersects a, then either aKb or a and b are identical’ and ‘If b is part of a, there are always events separated from b which are also parts of a, follows from Whitehead’s theses (i)–(vi) together with the appropriate definitions provided by the author. Consequently the theses (i)–(vi) do not provide, as might seem at first sight, an adequate axiomatic foundation for the theory of ‘events’ developed in Whitehead’s work... While analysing Tarski’s hypothesis mentioned above, I had a number of doubts of interpretative nature connected with particular theses formulated by Whitehead in a very colloquial way ... There was a particular difficulty in extracting a general schema for precise formulation of definitions in accordance with the author’s intentions from various accidental colloquial expressions that Whitehead uses to introduce new terms into his theory of ‘events’.