Individuation Article Swipe
YOU?
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· 2023
· Open Access
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· DOI: https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004503991_009
· OA: W4387136788
IndividuationIn his logical and metaphysical writings, Avicenna addressed the question of what makes each individual to be the individual it is.This might seem an odd thing to ask.It certainly makes sense to inquire why a given individual exists, which would simply be to ask after its cause.It is less obvious that we need to provide an explanation for why that given individual is an individual.Nonetheless the question was frequently posed in medieval philosophy, both in Latin Christendom and, above all thanks to Avicenna, in the Islamic world too.1 It arose naturally in the Aristotelian logical framework, which (as with the famous "tree of Porphyry") standardly envisioned broad genera under which were arranged increasingly narrow species.Thus under the genus of substance, one might have organic substances, then animals, then humans.At each stage some feature will demarcate the species within the genus, as rationality is the "specific difference ( faṣl)" that distinguishes humanity from other members of the animal kind.In this framework it seems almost inevitable to ask what distinguishes individuals within the lowest-level species.If humanity is picked out from animality by rationality, what is it that picks out Socrates from other humans?What needs to happen to a species that it becomes an individual, rather than becoming another, narrower species?This then is the problem of "individuation" (tashakhkhuṣ, from shakhṣ, "individual"), also called in our period "concretization (taʿayyun)," because to be an individual is to be one of the "concrete entities (aʿyān)."What is it, then, that distinguishes members of a species so as to make the individuals?Avicenna considers a couple of possible answers.One answer, which would be very influential in both the Islamic world and Latin scholasticism, is that the reason why there are numerically different individuals is matter.The idea here would be that there cannot be any distinct members of one species unless a species form
