  It is, however, unclear to what extent such prima facie commitments add up to an integrated phenomenon, as opposed to separate, independent dispositions. Moreover, even among those who favor a realist attitude towards the ontological status of events, there is significant disagreement concerning the precise nature of such entities. (Their broad characterization as ‘things that happen’, though commonly found in dictionaries, merely shifts the burden to the task of clarifying the meaning of ‘happen’.) One useful approach is to set them against entities belonging to other, philosophically more familiar, metaphysical categories. In the following we review the main contrasts between events and those categories that have in the literature been put forward explicitly as their ontological competitors, or at least as categories exhibiting significant differences with the category of events. Along the way, we shall also review the main conceptual tools that metaphysicians and other philosophers have adopted in their attempts to deal with events, either from a realist or from a non-realist perspective.