English

Noun

haecceitist ‎(plural haecceitists)

1. (philosophy) One who subscribes to haecceitism.
   • 1975 November 6, David Kaplan, “How to Russell a Frege–Church”, in The Journal of Philosophy, volume 72, number 19, DOI:10.2307/2024635, JSTOR 2024635, page 723:

     Probably, most of us are Haecceitists with respect to most things through time, but the very inaccessibility of other possible worlds seems to have produced a goodly number of Anti-Haecceitists with respect to trans-world identifications. Even when their quantified modal logics look Haecceitistic, their pre-systematic remarks may explain the so-called identities as a manner of speaking.

   • 1989, D[avid] M[alet] Armstrong, A Combinatorial Theory of Possibility, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-37780-5, pages 58–59:

     Here we find the dividing line between Haecceitism and anti-Haecceitism. The Haecceitist holds that members of each pair differ from each other. The anti-Haecceitist denies this. This has a consequence for Combinatorialism. The anti-Haecceitist Combinatorialist will countenance fewer possible worlds than the Haecceitist does.

   • 1993, G[ary] S. Rosenkrantz, Haecceity: An Ontological Essay [Philosophical Studies series; vol. 57], Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, ISBN 978-0-7923-2438-6, page 215:

     But a naive haecceitist would assert that when he perceives an external object he has a self-evident intuition that he grasps the haecceity of that object. Presumably, if a naive haecceitist grasps a haecceity of an external object in this way, then he can know that he grasps this haecceity.

   • 1997, D[avid] M[alet] Armstrong, A World of States of Affairs, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-58064-1, page 108:

     […] I argued that all we have here are just two verbally different formulations to which no ontological distinction corresponds. I called this position anti-haecceitist. A haecceitist was thus defined as one who holds that the two worlds are genuinely different.

   • 2008, Neil Feit, Belief about the Self: A Defense of the Property Theory of Content, New York, N.Y.: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-534136-2, page 37:

     Haecceitists maintain that individuals have nonqualitative essences, or haecceities, and that qualitatively indiscernible worlds can be indistinct; but they make an even stronger claim. We can take haecceitism to be the view that things have nonqualitative essences, but do not have any qualitative properties essentially.

   • 2012, William G. Lycan, Modality and Meaning, Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, ISBN 978-0-7923-3006-6, page 103:

     Though a Haecceitist does distinguish between a thing's essential properties and its accidental properties, the lopsided Haecceitist version of the distinction may be felt as less "invidious" than the accessible qualitative one implied by Russellian essentialism or even the inaccessible qualitative one recommended by [Saul] Kripke.

   • 2012, Robert Stalnaker, Mere Possibilities: Metaphysical Foundations of Modal Semantics, Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, ISBN 978-0-691-14712-3, page 54:

     He [David Kaplan] characterized the doctrine in highly metaphorical terms, but the basic idea of his way of drawing the distinction was that the haecceitist allows, while the anti-haecceitist rejects, the reducible identification of individuals across possible worlds. According to Kaplan's anti-haecceitist, individuals in different possible worlds may be "clothed in attributes which cause them to resemble one another closely. But there is no metaphysical reality of sameness or difference which underlies the clothes." The haecceitist, in contrast, holds that for individuals in different possible worlds, "a common 'thisness' may underlie extreme dissimilarity or distinct thisness may underlie great resemblance."

Related terms

• haecceitic
• haecceitism
• haecceitistic
• haecceitistically
• haecceity