Events: New Work on Their Ontology and Semantics (ENWOS)

Workshop at the Université Côte d’Azur, Nice

Events (in the broad sense) play a fundamental role in our interaction with the world: actions, events, processes, states are crucial components of reality as we represent it. Research on events comprises disciplines as diverse as natural language semantics, the syntax-semantic interface, analytic metaphysics, applied ontology and conceptual modeling. 

Events have come to play a central role in natural language semantics since Davidson’s highly influential proposal and has led to a great range of developments including, in its Neo-Davidsonian version in the syntax–semantic interface. However, there is a range of challenges that has received little attention, such as the distinction between events and acts, events and abstract states, events and situations, and the implications of cartography for event semantics. Moreover, there are alternatives to Davidsonian events semantics that have been proposed, but ask for further developments, such as truthmaker semantics, force semantics and radical decomposition of verbs in syntax.

Recently, also the metaphysics of events have seen renewed interest. Several issues have been addressed such as that concerning nature of, and the internal structure of, processes and events, the related issue that concerns the modal profile and the essential properties of events (and whether these features differ from the ones possessed by processes), the question of whether a theory concerning these entities has a descriptive or prescriptive import, as well as the issue concerning the relations between events, dispositions, and causation, and that concerning the nature of negative events and actions.

Finally, the notion of event is pervasive and plays a key role in applied ontology and conceptual modeling. It is a general category of the most widespread foundational ontologies such as UFO, DOLCE, and BFO. On the one hand, these ontologies recently provided insightful accounts concerning the nature of events, their part-whole structure, and their difference from, e.g., situations, states, and processes. On the other hand, the notion of events played a key role in elucidating notions such as those of prevention, risk, production, money, and many others. This conference aims to bring together new research on events from different perspectives. 

Submission: If you want to contribute, please submit an abstract of approximately 1000 words suitable for a 30-minutes presentation that should be prepared for blind review and include a cover page with the full name, institution, and contact information. Abstracts should be sent in PDF format to: enwosworkshop@gmail.com. Notification of acceptance: 15 April 2024

Conference Fees: 60€ regular; 40€ students/unemployed

Webpage:https://sites.google.com/view/enwos

Organizers: Niko Angelopoulos, Riccardo Baratella, Lena Baunaz, Ludger Jansen, Friederike Moltmann, Kalle Mueller