Haecceity? A Phenomenological Perspective

The concern of this paper is the nature of personal identity. Its target is the account Lynne Baker gives of personal identity in terms of haecceity, or rather, in terms of that particular reading of Scotus’ principle of individuation that has been widely accepted in a late 20th century debate on the metaphysics of modality (Plantinga 1974, Adams 1979 and others) and that Baker’s account appears to share. I shall try to show that such “haecceitistic implications” (Baker 2013, p. 179) of her theory of personhood miss something essential to the very question of personal identity, such as the question emerges within the lifeworld, i.e., in the world of everyday encounters and ordinary experience. This “something essential” seems to be better accounted for by a different theory of essential individuation or haecceity, which, as it happens, turns out to be more similar to Scotus’ original theory (prior to Occam) than modern haecceitism.