Many contemporary philosophers are interested in the scotistic  notion of haecceity or `thisness' because it is relevant to important  problems concerning identity and individuation, reference, modality,  and propositional attitudes. Haecceity is the only book-length  work devoted to this topic. The author develops a novel defense of  Platonism, arguing, first, that abstracta - nonqualitative  haecceities - are needed to explain concreta's being diverse at  a time; and second, that unexemplified haecceities are then required  to accommodate the full range of cases in which there are possible  worlds containing individuals not present in the actual world. In the  cognitive area, an original epistemic argument is presented which  implies that certain haecceities can be grasped by a person: his own,  those of certain of his mental states, and those of various  abstracta, but not those of external things. It is argued that  in consequence there is a clear sense in which one is directly  acquainted with the former entities, but not with external things.

Haecceity: An Ontological Essay PDF

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