Experience and Possibility

This book is concerned with the ontology of the things that we experience, especially in regard to its modal features. Ontology studies the basic categories of beings, including particulars like chairs, properties like being yellow, and relations like being on. But this book focuses specifically on the ontology of the ordinary objects that our sensory experience seems to reveal, for instance blue cars and green trees. It investigates the colors, shapes, and other concrete properties these familiar objects present in experience, their spatial relations, and whatever beyond their concrete properties and relations is required to constitute them as the specific objects that they seem to be. But there is also another aspect of this topic: modality. Modality concerns what is possible and what is necessary, what could be and what must be. The central novelty of the book is an intense focus on the modal aspect of these experienced particulars and properties, and what it can tell us about modality in general. The proper understanding of such properties and relations and such forms of particularity has many implications regarding what is and is not possible. The reality of these sorts of properties, relations, and particularity would involve in surprising ways not merely what would be hence actual but what would be merely possible. And these phenomena support a novel general conception of modality, of the possible and the necessary, according to which the actual and the possible are locally entwined and involve different types of being.