Extension, Event, Action

Spinoza's adaptation of Descartes' concept of Extension remains unexplained until his introduction of his concept of Parallelism, in II:vii of the Ethics.  There, he more precisely characterizes the relation between the two attributes of Substance, Thought and Extension, as that between the "power of thinking" and the "power of action".  Thus, his alternative characterization of the latter, the "order and connection of things", slightly, but significantly, misrepresents it, by reifying 'action' as 'thing'.  He thereby replaces a potential Ontology of Events with the more traditional Ontology of Things.  Instead, the first notable development of an Ontology of Events is Kant's concept of Knowledge as constituted by his temporalized Categories, the products of which are diachronic propositions, or, equivalently, events.  Thus, 'S is P' is not an a-temporal ascription of P to the static entity P, but a relation between two events, one more permanent than the other.  One significant application of that analysis is to 'I am', which, thus, entails diachronicity, and, hence, as Kant argues against Descartes, in his B edition Refutation of Idealism, requires the existence of some external object.  More recently, probably Whitehead has gone furthest in developing an Ontology of Events, while his erstwhile colleague and his peer, Russell and Wittgenstein, reify it as an Ontology of Propositions, and of Facts, respectively.  But none of these have gone so far as to consider an Ontology of Actions that is implicit in Spinoza's concept of Extension, in which everything that occurs in a universe the immanent deity of which is the Seminal Logos, is a deliberate event, i. e. an action.