The Principle of Individuation

This is the second chapter of my book Transformation of the Self. It concerns Schleiermacher's understanding of the principle of individuation, in dialogue with Kant, Jacobi, Leibniz and Spinoza

Consciousness and Intentionality in Anton Marty’s Lecture on Descriptive Psychology

Abstract: In this study, I propose to examine Marty’s reconstruction of the general framework in which Brentano develops his theory of consciousness. My starting point is the formulation, at the very beginning of the second chapter of the second book of Brentano’s Psychology, of two theses on mental phenomena, which constitute the basis of Brentano’s theory of primary and secondary objects. In the second part, I examine the objection of infinite regress raised against Brentano’s theory of primary and secondary objects and Marty’s interpretation of Brentano’s theory of the unity of consciousness. The third part bears on the important distinction between implicit and explicit consciousness, which Brentano introduces in his lectures on descriptive psychology. Here, I analyse Marty’s principle of individuation in light of the modifications which Brentano made to his theory of consciousness after the publication of his Psychology in 1874. The last section is an examination of Marty’s conception of consciousness as self-consciousness with respect to his principle of individuation

Individuation in the Main Characters of J.K. Rowling's HARRY POTTER Series

This paper examines the individuation of Potter and Voldemort in Harry Potter series. To be a holistic individual, a person needs to be individuated by managing their three main archetypes. The three main archetypes are persona, shadow, and anima or animus. Potter and Voldemort have to manage their archetypes their journey as human beings. Each of them has to know his persona including his appearance, behavior and role; confront his shadow; and balance his anima. In the end, Potter manages himself to be a individuated person who can lead a good life, while Voldemort fails to be an individuated person and, as a result, he died

Qualitative individuation in permutation-invariant quantum mechanics

In this article I expound an understanding of the quantum mechanics of so-called "indistinguishable" systems in which permutation invariance is taken as a symmetry of a special kind, namely the result of representational redundancy. This understanding has heterodox consequences for the understanding of the states of constituent systems in an assembly and for the notion of entanglement. It corrects widespread misconceptions about the inter-theoretic relations between quantum mechanics and both classical particle mechanics and quantum field theory. The most striking of the heterodox consequences are: (i) that fermionic states ought not always to be considered entangled; (ii) it is possible for two fermions or two bosons to be discerned using purely monadic quantities; and that (iii) fermions (but not bosons) may always be so discerned.Comment: 58 pages, 5 figure

Content Individuation and Evolutionary Content Emergence

This short paper addresses two connected issues which were brought to some focused light by Searle’s comments on my contributed article to the anthology Searle’s philosophy and Chinese Philosophy: Constructive Engagement. The first issue concerns the claim that animals cannot have observer-independent intentional content of the same type as that of human beings. The second is my denial that mental content can be merely caused in specific brain states, given its holistic and normative character. I defend my position on the second issue by distinguishing content individuation from content realization while I elaborate my relatively more sophisticated argument for the first claim by clarifying two related senses or levels of ‘content’ and ‘self’, respectively associated with certain quasi-rational capacities from a third-person perspective and the subjective holistic consciousness from a first-person perspective with the explicit social-discursive dimension. Searle’s Connection Principle is briefly drawn on in this context, with an eye to showing its potential significance when it is extended into the evolutionary settings. In short, it is the full-blown rationality of human holistic discursive practice that ultimately grounds the content talk, which then becomes meaningfully ascribable to certain natural forms of animal existence