ABSTRACT
Haecceitism is the view that the identity of an object across possible worlds is brute, in the sense that it does not supervene on the qualities or relations instantiated by that object. This becomes clearer with an example. Imagine a world, call it ‘w’, that is just like ours in every respect, except that in w Elvis Presley has all the (qualitative) properties that Napoleon has in the actual world, and Napoleon has all the (qualitative) properties that Elvis has in the actual world. Hence, in w, Napoleon was born in 1935 in Mississippi and grew up to become the world’s best known rock and roll singer in the 1950s and 1960s, whereas Elvis was born in 1769 in Corsica and grew up to become Emperor of the first French Empire. In other words, for the haecceitist, there are worlds that, despite instantiating all the same qualities and relations, are nonetheless different; this difference being a matter of the identity of the objects existing in those worlds.
