English

Noun

haecceitism ‎(uncountable)

1. (philosophy) The view that entities possess haecceity (individual essences or "thisness").
   • 1986, Gary Rosenkrantz, “On Objects Totally Out of this World”, in Rudolf Haller, editor, Non-existence and Predication [Grazer philosophische Studien; 25/26], Amsterdam: Rodopi, ISBN 978-90-6203-768-1, page 207:

     As I've argued, the conjunction of actualism, an attractive view about the nature of possibility, and the plausible thesis that some possible objects are disjoint entails haecceitism. Moreover, if, as the foregoing considerations suggest, there are no serious objections to haecceitism, then the charge that either actualism or the thesis in question is false because their conjunction entails haecceitism is unjustified. Thus, we have a plausible argument for haecceitism.

   • 1999, J. A. Cover; John O'Leary-Hawthorne, Substance and Individuation in Leibniz, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, ISBN 978-0-521-59394-6, page 145:

     [D]espite the commonplace (if sometimes implicit) presumption of haecceitism underlying the work of [Gottfried Wilhelm] Leibniz and his commentators, there is remarkably strong pressure in Leibniz's mature philosophy toward anti-haecceitism.

   • 2005, Nathan U[cuzoglu] Salmon, Metaphysics, Mathematics, and Meaning, Oxford: Oxford University Press, ISBN 978-0-19-928176-3, page 204:

     The haecceity of an individual x is the property of being identical with x, i.e. the property of being that very individual. [David] Kaplan defines Haecceitism as the doctrine that

     we can meaningfully ask whether a possible individual that exists in one possible world also exists in another without taking into account the attributes and behavior of the individuals that exist in the one world and making a comparison with the attributes and behavior of the individuals that live in the other world ... [the] doctrine that holds that it does make sense to ask – without reference to common attributes and behavior – whether this is the same individual in another possible world, that individuals can be extended in logical space (i.e., through possible worlds) in much the way we commonly regard them as being extended in physical space and time, and that a common "thisness" may underlie extreme dissimilarity or distinct thisnesses may underlie great resemblance, ...

   • 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, pages 37 and 39:

     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. […] According to the kind of haecceitism required by [Robert] Stalnaker, in order for some individual at another possible world to be you, it needs only your haecceity and it could have any other properties. For instance (to borrow an example from Lewis), you could have been a poached egg.

   • 2010, Peter Loptson, Reality: Fundamental Topics in Metaphysics, 2nd edition, Ottawa, Ont.: University of Ottawa Press, ISBN 978-0-7766-0708-5, page 113:

     Haecceitism as such, in the first sense, is neutral about whether a certain horse may not essentially be a horse, or a gold ring be essentially made of gold, or the Queen necessarily have had George VI as her father. Haecceitism, rather, denies that the identity of a substance at a time or its continuing identity over time is constituted by, logically a function of, or dependent on such properties.

   • 2011, Helen Beebee; Nikk Effingham; Philip Goff, Metaphysics: The Key Concepts, Abingdon, Oxon.; New York, N.Y.: Routledge, ISBN 978-0-415-55927-0, page 89:

     Haecceitism is the view that the identity of an object across possible worlds is brute, in the sense that it does not supervene on the qualities or relations instantiated by that object.

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

     The jargon is of course of medieval origin, but the term ‘haecceitism’ was introduced into contemporary discussions of modal metaphysics by David Kaplan. He 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
• haecceitist
• haecceitistic
• haecceitistically
• haecceity