This is the case with the medium sized dry goods constituting the ontology of mundane experience. The chief reason is that an ontology can select a range of individuable, persisting and therefore reidentifiable particulars, whose status as such is entirely determined by their relation to a theory or point of view which finds it convenient to treat them as such, without concomitantly holding that these things are in any way ultimate. One can hold some version of either without any entailment to versions of the other. The question of how, if at all, these two understandings of thesis A are related is a matter of controversy. The connection between the two aspects is that asserting X's independence in this sense means that X is to be understood as not essentially or internally related to anything else, of which it must therefore be considered part or along with which it has therefore to be individuated. The idea of individual substances has its busiest employment precisely here. This second aspect of the notion is a rich one, for it plays a part in a story whose other themes - individuation, identity, particularity - are familiar indeed. Consider a pebble: in what sense can it be understood as a dependent individual once its causal history - its having been produced by cooling lava, say - has been discounted? In this guise the thesis aims at asserting the ontological irreducibility of X to its material and efficient causes, and the ontological definability of X in a scheme of things, with its own path through a world, say, or its own separately countable membership of it. Of course it could be argued that X is dependent on a class or classes of things - say, foodstuffs - but this does not alter the descriptive adequacy of treating X as an individuable existent. It might be a fact that X is in this way dependent on things external to itself but the point is that any suitable external will do, so there is nothing to which X's dependence is metaphysically annexed. Or thesis A might be taken more weakly to mean that, having been caused, a thing X exists as a genuine individual whose dependence on other things, for example food supplies if X is an animal, is only necessary in the sense of physical law, and hence is metaphysically contingent. To make it metaphysical realism which the thesis thus understood amounts to, a bruteness claim has to be taken as a candidate for literal truth. But no-one need go out on an ontological limb in this way to get a notion of 'existence in its own right' there is always an epistemological limb to venture along, which says that it is just a brute fact, to be accepted as primitive, that there are certain things which exist in this primary way. For there might be nothing contradictory in a description of the universe, whether false or not, in which the existence of certain self-caused beings is denied and the reverse would have to be true if the entities in question were to have a chance of being necessary in the required fashion. A reason for caution is that giving a negative answer to the question: could there not be a conception of contingently self-caused beings, in the sense that other facts about the universe do not necessitate their existence? is not obviously called for by the terms of the question itself. ![]() It is not obvious, without further taxonomy, whether the latter, stronger, notion is coterminous with the notion of necessary being, but apologists at any rate standardly so construe it. This is existence which is basic to other, derivative, existence it at least explains itself, and perhaps indeed - as in theological employments of the notion - it causes itself. Formulations like 'existence in its own right' and 'absolute and ultimate existence' suggest a full Aristotelian concept of primary ousia. Understandings of thesis A fall into at least two broad categories. But I am not confident that there is clarification ready to hand. Some of the more heroic moments in the history of philosophy consist in efforts to clarify it, for what is at issue, after all, is no less than the metaphysics of being. ![]() This thesis is sometimes been called 'metaphysical realism'. Such entities might be conceived as having the status of something like Aristotle's primary being, or at any rate as substances conceived as those things (or that thing, for monists) which exist, and can only be understood as doing so, in some sense in and of themselves. It consists in thinking about the entities in a given realm as existing in their own right, independently of other things which cause or, more weakly, sustain them in being. The first way is familiar enough in its various guises as a metaphysical commitment, typically to a notion of substance but it is difficult to state precisely. The confusion infecting the realism debate arises from thinking of given realms of entities in two different ways at once, or more precisely, from conflating two ways of thinking.
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