Philosophy Speaker Series: Why People Like Us Are Metaphysically Necessary

What is metaphysically necessary about people like us is the fact that sometime and someplace (by no means always and everywhere) some embodied thinking and perceiving subjects exist in the spatiotemporal universe – be they Earthlings or Martians, or what have you. This subjectivity thesis, as I use to call it, will be shown in two steps, with regard to the problematic, first, of epistemic individuation and, second, ontic individuation of things. We achieve epistemic individuation, i.e. the singling out of particular things for definite singular reference, by combined uses of descriptive and indexical means (“that brown chair over there”). Indexical expressions form an informal egocentric coordinate system, whose origin (me here now) has to be singled out, then, pre-descriptively and pre-indexically in an a priori self-individuation and self-localization of an embodied thinking and perceiving subject. Thus, a priori self-localization of embodied subjects is a presupposition of epistemic individuation. Ontic individuation is what accounts for the individuality of things, i.e. for the categorial fact that there is no entity without identity. The individuality of things is threatened, though, by the possibility of massive symmetries and reduplications in space and time (cf. Max Black’s two-sphere world or David Lewis’s two-way eternal recurrence). What guarantees ontic individuation even under such unfavorable circumstances is epistemic individuation. Being the only candidate around, epistemic individuation is therefore necessary as a guarantee of ontic individuation (i.e. of the individuality of things) and so, then, is embodied subjectivity. Q.E.D.