Aquinas Lecture 2025: “The Ontology of Individual Particulars“

Anna Marmodoro (Durham University, Universitá della Svizzera Italiana)

Aquinas Lecture 2025: Anna Marmodoro:

“The Ontology of Individual Particulars“

Abstract
Peter Strawson claimed that each object of our everyday experience is one qua individual particular. However, why would something be one (= single), if it is individual and also particular? I argue that individuality and particularity introduce two different ways of being one; individuality is descriptive, while particularity is indexical. And yet, each object is one! How can this be? I argue that Aristotle, too, had thought that an object is an individual particular (tode ti – hekaston/ti), but he argued that, additionally, the oneness of an individual particular requires metaphysical justification. Aristotle’s solution is that an ‘individual particular’ is one because what’s particular qualifies what’s individual in the object (particularising it). I further suggest the alternative possibility of developing the converse of Aristotle’s solution for oneness, namely, that an ‘individual particular’ is one because what’s individual qualifies what’s particular in the object (individualising it). I do so by leaning on the (anti-Aristotelian, anti-descriptivist) ‘indexical metaphysics’ of Michael Ayers.

Anna Marmodoro is the Leonard and Elizabeth Eslick Professor of Philosophy at Saint Louis University (US) and Honorary Professor of Philosophy at Durham University (UK), where she
held the Chair of Metaphysics between 2016 and 2024. She specializes primarily in ancient philosophy and contemporary metaphysics. Her latest books are Properties in Ancient Metaphysics (CUP, 2023) and Forms and Structure in Plato’s Metaphysics (OUP 2021). She is currently working on a new monograph titled: Parmenidean Essentialism.
She is also the co-editor of Dialogoi. Ancient Philosophy Today, published by
Edinburgh University Press.