entities enjoy some of their modes of being merely contingently. So the answers to
these questions are non-obvious.
Let’s provisionally assume that, as a matter of necessity, I enjoy K if I enjoy any
mode of being at all, and that, as a matter of necessity, anything that enjoys K is
identical with me. On these assumptions, enjoying K is a property that necessarily
I and only I exemplify. In section 6.5, we discussed haecceities but did not pursue an
account of their nature. But given the assumptions just made, a plausible account
presents itself: my haecceity just is the property of enjoying my personal mode of
being. On this way thinking, a haecceity is not a complex property that somehow has
an individual as a constituent. Instead, it is built up purely out of other properties in
just the same way as other ways of enjoying modes of being. We are thereby spared
the need to consider what manner of composition is in play that constructs haecce-
ities out of individuals and properties.
On this way of thinking, we have a kind of explanation of why haecceitistic facts
are brute facts. In general, it is brute which modes of being are fundamental, and it is
a brute fact which of these modes of being are enjoyed. If personal modes of being are
among the fundamental, there is no metaphysical explanation to be had of why this is
the case—and there is also no metaphysical explanation to be had for why those of
them that are enjoyed are enjoyed. If I enjoy my own personal mode of being, it is
therefore less surprising that whether I exist at a given world is not determined solely
by the array of qualitative features present at that world.
Does this mean that whether a person persists over time must be brute as well? Not
obviously—it depends on how we understand the relationships between person,
world, and time. It might be that the relation between a person and a time is not
an existential relation, contrary to what was suggested in section 2.4.1, but rather
simply is a relation of occupation. Given this, it might be that, even though whether a
person exists in a world at all is a brute fact, whether a person occupies a given time is
accounted for by facts about her occupation of previous times, the array of qualities
enjoyed by that person across time, and so on.
6.8 Chapter Summary
There are people, but how people exist is unclear. I argued that it is part of our
evaluative self-conception that persons are fully real, but declined to take this as proof
that we are fully real. Instead, I explored a series of arguments for this conclusion.
A common premise of these arguments is that a sufficient condition for being fully
real is instantiating a perfectly natural property or relation. Specific arguments
appealed to properties such aswhat it’s like to taste chocolate, being Kris McDaniel,
certain moral properties such as intrinsic value, and freedom. We did not settle the
question of whether we fully exist, but I hope that I have demonstrated how complex
the issues involved are.