The Primordial Event & The Eternal Present

The appeal to and use of events in philosophical theorising, implicitly or explicitly, is utterly ubiquitous. However, relatively little attention has been given to events themselves, compared to other entities, like objects. This is unfortunate because events are as problematic, if not more so. This thesis has two aims. The first is a ‘negative’ aim. I argue that the two most natural construal of events, that they are entities that occur at some time or over some interval of time, are untenable posits in our ontology and that we should deny that they exist (except for one). This is because they run into problems to do with either Zeno’s paradoxes, the perception of change, or ineliminable arbitrariness in their individuation. The second is a positive aim. I argue that, in light of the negative conclusions reached, we are forced into certain views not only about events, but time as a whole. Namely, I argue that a view I call event monism is true. This is the view that there is single event constitutive of the entire duration of the history of the universe. I defend this view from objections and show that it has far-reaching consequences both for how we conceive of the entities that exist and our role as inquirers into the structure of this event.