Russell’s Theories of Events and Instants from the Perspective of Point-Free Ontologies in the Tradition of the Lvov-Warsaw School

Abstract

We classify two of Bertrand Russell’s theories of events within the point-free ontology. The first of such approaches was presented informally by Russell in “The World of Physics and the World of Sense” (Lecture IV in Our Knowledge of the External World (1914)). Based on this theory, Russell sketched ways to construct instants as collections of events. This paper formalises Russell’s approach from (1914). We will also show that in such a reconstructed theory, we obtain all axioms of Russell’s second theory from (1936) and all axioms of Thomason’s theory of events from (1989). Russell’s work certainly influenced the works of Stanisław Leśniewski, his student Alfred Tarski, and Czesław Lejewski—prominent members of the Lvov-Warsaw School (LWS). We see our work in the tradition of the research of Leśniewski and Tarski. Building on the technical tools developed in this environment and in the spirit of the traditional research of the LWS, we engage here, in particular, with two classic works by Russell on fundamental ontology.