ABSTRACT
Human actions are those human doings that can be explained by their doers' propositional attitudes. Philosophers are largely agreed that doings are events; they are far from agreed about what events are. It is sometimes assumed that all events are changes. That is certainly a mistake. Socrates' staying in prison was an event that was also an action, a refraining from the escape his friends had arranged; it was not a change. Goldman's theory identifies events with what he calls property-exemplifications: two events are the same if they are exemplifications of the same property by the same individual object at the same time. Actions are events in which the individual object is a person, and the exemplification of the property arises from propositional attitudes of that person. Goldman vainly attempts to dispose of this objection by grouping events into 'event-trees', and treating distinct events as distinct occurrences only when they belong to distinct event-trees.
