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RESEARCH PRODUCT

Guises and their Existence

subject

description

According to H-N. Castafieda, a guise the very thin individual which lies at the bottom of the ontological furniture of the world is indifferent to existence in a Meinongian way, in the sense that it remains the same whether it exists or not. Moreover, its existence does not alter its intentional character, as it is the very same individual which is thought of regardless of its being real or not. ~ In what follows, I will attempt to show that with regards to guises both theses are illegitimate, unless one introduces the notion of an existentiallyconditioned property as a counterfactual property which a guise has prior to its actual existence. To do so means to work out an amendment to Castafieda's Guise Theory, as the doctrine which supports his main ontological assumptions. Following Castafieda, a guise is a concrete individual made up o f both a set of monadic properties P1, P2, ..., the so called guise core, and a Fregean-like incomplete entity, an individuator c o f concretization, which the core saturates. As the former brings about the difference between guises, the latter is responsible for its being an individual; it is a formal, categorial, entity, which in natural languages has an informal counterpart in what is expressed by the notation "the thing which alone is just ...,.2 As hinted above, a guise is Meinongian in style, for existence is depicted by Castafieda as an external property of it, that