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Throughout Concept of Nature Whitehead adds different types of characteristics to his most basic concept - events.

For example, he talks of objects, the situation of the event in space and time, its relation to other events et cetra.

I kind of expected, from a mathematician that uses a systematic/formulaic kind of philosophical explanation of his system of nature, to have a very definitive set of characteristics for his concepts - especially events. Instead I see that in every chapter he adds more characteristics and always keeps it vague as saying "there are more but I won't explore it now". I'm reaching the end of the book and it still seems that he hasn't explored them all.

So, my question would be, did Whitehead actually defined a set of characteristics to the concept of an event - and if so what are they?

Yechiam Weiss
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Maybe it is useful to refer to Whitehead's scientific background.

See Alfred North Whitehead The Principle of Relativity with Applications to Physical Science (1922), page 21:

"Nature usually presents itself to our imagination as being composed of all those entities which are to be found somewhere at some time. [...] Thus an essential significance of a factor of nature is its reference to something that happened in time and space. I give the name "event" to a spatio-temporal happening. An event does not in any way imply rapid change; the endurance of a block of marble is an event. Nature presents itself to us as essentially a becoming, and any limited portion of nature which preserves most completely such concreteness as attaches to nature itself is also a becoming and is what I call an event. By this I do not mean a bare portion of space-time. Such a concept is a further abstraction. I mean a part of the becomingness of nature, coloured with all the hues of its content.

Compare with Process and Reality. An Essay in Cosmology (1929), page 73:

The philosophy of organism starts by agreeing with ‘the vulgar’ except that the term ‘sensible object’ is replaced by ‘actual entity’; so as to free our notions from participation in an epistemological theory as to sense-perception. [...] I will also use the term ‘actual occasion’ in the place of the term ‘actual entity’. Thus the actual world is built up of actual occasions; and by the ontological principle whatever things there are in any sense of ‘existence’, are derived by abstraction from actual occasions. I shall use the term ‘event’ in the more general sense of a nexus of actual occasions, interrelated in some determinate fashion in one extensive quantum. An actual occasion is the limiting type of an event with only one member.

Mauro ALLEGRANZA
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    I think that this is more than a mere long comment: It defines events as spatiotemporal happenings. That he "adds" more (possible) characteristics when discussing particular *types* of events is not surprising if one considers the vast set this definition of event comprises. – Philip Klöcking Oct 16 '20 at 10:23