Abstract
There was once a lively debate concerning the individuation of events and whether, for example, “Brutus’s stabbing of Caesar” was the same action as “Brutus’s killing of Caesar.” More recently, I attempted to reinvigorate this debate by suggesting a new reason for distinguishing these two as separate actions: the inherent indeterminacy of Caesar’s death in “Brutus’s stabbing of Caesar” but not in “Brutus’s killing of Caesar” and further proposed that the debate was significant because it has intimate connections to theories of causation. Katarzyna Paprzycka has carefully and thoughtfully shown that my original argument fails to cogently demonstrate the fine-grained theory of events because one cannot compellingly show that the determinacy with respect to Caesar’s death in “Brutus’s killing of Caesar” would transfer to “Brutus’s stabbing of Caesar.” However, the intuition behind the original argument may still survive as it is perhaps possible to argue directly that the best explanation for how there is an indeterminacy in “Brutus’s stabbing of Caesar” but not in “Brutus’s killing of Caesar” is that they are distinct events. In that case, there is still a “new” argument for a fine-grained theory of action individuation.