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When one is speaking with overwhelming emphasis about the importance of the notion of "event" in philosophy or culture, it would be helpful to know what one is even talking about, since events come in many shapes and forms. In a trivial sense, every occurrence is an event. This book is an event, but so is this word, say, the word "word" as it is used in this sentence. This micro-event entails, in turn, a host of other events: every letter and syllable of the word "word" can be viewed as an event, as can its phonetic pronunciation and the events it implies, what goes on in our mind when we utter or understand it, the font used to print it, the story of those fonts and of writing itself, which has something to do with the history of human civilization, which is an event in itself. There are events that strike our imagination, and others we hardly notice or can not notice at all, such as all the chemical processes going on in our bodies or in those of an ant, a cell, or a subatomic particle. To use a classical terminology, the notion of event is as wide in extension as it is narrow in intention.

DOI: 10.1057/9781137333735_5

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