The aim of the paper is to present Davidson's account of events and to show his semantic way of approaching this metaphysical issue. The author outlines Davidson's views on action sentences and other parts of natural language, which led him to postulating a special variable for events, i.e. in event ontology. Secondly, the author gives a brief summary of the most important views presented in the discussion on events and their nature. On this background the uniqueness of Davidson's approach is highlighted. Finally, the author emphasizes the difference between semantic and metaphysical approaches to events and argues that Davidson is primarily interested in the semantics of the natural language. His argumentation concerning the nature of events is based on the latter. In the author's view this type of semantic approach to a metaphysical topic is one-sided and it may suffer from the shortcomings mentioned in conclusion.
In the paper, the author distinguishes between the semantic and the 'direct' approach to event ontology. The first approach, employed by D. Davidson, starts with logical analysis of natural language. This analysis uncovers quantification over the domain of events. Thus, we have ontological commitment to events and, at the same time, also a suggestion of how to view their nature. The second approach, used by J. Kim and D. Lewis, deals with events 'directly', i.e. not by analyzing language first. Events are postulated because they are useful in other theories (of causation, explanation, etc.) and their nature is adjusted to the needs of these theories. In the paper, the author analyzes both approaches and outlines their problems and advantages. He concludes that we should conditionally prefer the latter approach on the methodological grounds. This preference is based on the assumption that submitting hypotheses to the tests seems to be a crucial part of metaphysical methodology. Since the 'direct' approach to event ontology allows for more testing, it should be preferred over the semantic approach.
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