haecceity

A haecceity or individual essence is a property that only a single object instantiates.

Haecceitism is the perspective implied by the belief that entities can have haecceity.

Later followers of Scotus called this principle haecceity or 'thisness'.

He makes use of the analogy with quantum mechanical particles, that have quiddity but no haecceity.

Sheep are more intelligent than grass or that haecceity of the writer which manures the greensward.

The haecceity of work.

This is at the heart of Scotist realism, particularly at the theories of haecceity and formal distinction.

Similarly, the distinction between the 'thisness' or haecceity of a thing is intermediate between a real and a conceptual distinction.

Lewis also argues against three other alternatives that might be compatible with possibilism: overlapping individuals, trans-world individuals, and haecceity.

Another way to explain a haecceity is to distinguish between suchness and thisness, where thisness has a more demonstrative character.

Haecceity thus enabled Scotus to find a middle ground in the debate over universals between Nominalism and Realism.

Stachel uses the term quiddity to describe the universal qualities of an entity and haecceity to describe its individuality.

Haecceity is a person or object's "thisness", the individualising difference between the concept 'a man' and the concept 'Socrates' (a specific person).

Haecceity may be defined in some dictionaries as simply the "essence" of a thing, or as a simple synonym for quiddity or hypokeimenon.

He used the word haecceity in his seminal Studies in Ethnomethodology (1963), to enhance the indexical inevitable character of any expression, situation, behavior or situation.

Peirce interprets Scotus's idea of individuation or haecceity (thisness) in terms of his own category of "secondness."

Nicknamed Doctor Subtilis (the subtle doctor), he is well known for the "univocity of being," the formal distinction, and the idea of haecceity.

( 8) If everything which happens to Alexander derives from the haecceity of Alexander, then fatalism threatens Leibniz's construction:

While terms such as haecceity, quiddity, noumenon and hypokeimenon all evoke the essence of a thing, they each have subtle differences and refer to different aspects of the thing's essence.

The study of particular situations in their "haecceity" - aimed at disclosing the ordinary, ongoing social order that is constructed by the members and their practices - is the object of ethnomethodology.

Quiddity was often contrasted by the scholastic philosophers with the haecceity or "thisness" of an item, which was supposed to be a positive characteristic of an individual that caused them to be this individual, and no other.

This in no way conflicts with the fallibility and revisability of scientific concepts, since it is only the immediate percept in its unique individuality or "thisness" - what the Scholastics called its 'haecceity' - that stands beyond control and correction.

The intense thereness of it-haecceity Sax had called it once, when John had asked him something about his religious beliefs-I believe in haecceity, Sax had said, in thisness, in here-and-nowness, in the particular individuality of every moment.

Rather it is hoped that the haecceity of this enchiridion of arcane and recondite sesquipedalian items will appeal to the oniomania of an eximious Gemeinschaft whose legerity and sophrosyne, whose Sprachgefühl and orexis will find more than fugacious fulfillment among its felicific pages."

Phenomenology is the field of studying the phenomena as such, and can thus be seen as a contemporary philosophical version of the medieval concept of haecceity, though it does not focus on the quiddity of phenomenon or their essence, but rather on the practices and perceptions that construct the phenomena.