2024.09.4 : View this Review Online | View Recent NDPR Reviews
Matthew Davidson, About Haecceity: An Essay in Ontology, Routledge, 2024, 154pp., $144.00 (hbk), ISBN 9781032575148.
Reviewed by Sam Cowling, Denison University
Is there a property of being Socrates? If so, what is it like and what distinguishes it from properties like being blue or being oblong? This concise book by Matthew Davidson is a concerted effort to get to the bottom of the metaphysics of haecceities—the controversial category of properties like being Socrates and being identical with Donald Trump.
The central thesis of About Haecceity is constituentist realism. On this view, haecceities exist and have as their constituents the entities that exemplify them. So, for example, being Socrates has Socrates as a constituent, while being red and being round have no objects as constituents. On Davidson’s preferred version of constituentist realism, haecceities belong to a sui generis category of abstract entity, each of which has an individual…
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