Haecceities: Essentialism, Identity, and Abstraction

Jeffrey Strayer is an artist and philosopher who teaches philosophy at Indiana University-Purdue University Fort Wayne. His Haecceities series consists of works of art in which kinds of radical artistic identity and various Abstract limits are demonstrated. For more information, please visit www.JeffreyStrayer.com.

"Strayer, in Haecceities, gives us a fascinating, extended intellectual meditation on the limits of abstraction in art, and does so with such a breathtaking relentlessness, that it is unlikely that anyone could ever write a more definitive book on the subject." - Phil Jenkins, Marywood University, in: Philosophy in Review 39.2 (2019)

• Acknowledgments List of Haecceity Illustrations and FiguresPART ONEIntroduction1. Theses of Abstraction. 2. The essential elements of an artistic complex and the idea of Essentialism or Essentialist Abstraction.3. Radical identity.4. Essence and Essentialism.5. Consciousness. 6. Objects. 7. Summary and the goals and workings of Essentialism. PART TWOSpace, Time, Language, and Objects and Particular Matters of General Relevance to Essentialism8. The particularity of objects and the use of the term ‘haecceity’ in regard to Essentialist artworks.9. Space, language, and the perceptual object.10. Effects of the algorithm: visible and invisible, on and off the surface.11. Time and the perceptual object. 12. Space, time, language, and the perceptual object. 13. Meaning, specification tokens, and matrices. 14. Time and the specified object. 15. Change and the perceptual object. 16. Interpretation. 17. The delimitation of logical space and a subject’s history of awareness. PART THREEHaecceities, Ideational Objects, and Identity18. No artwork without an identity.19. Traditional identity in the visual arts.20. Essentialism and identity.21. Haecceities and ideational objects.22. Kinds of ideational identity.23. Basic and sophisticated space, meaning, identity, and work.24. Haecceity artwork identity: preliminary points.25. Disseminated identity.26. Distributed identity.27. Disseminated and/or distributed identity.28. Non-disseminated and non-distributed identity.29. Aesthetic properties and basic and sophisticated space.30. Homogeneous identity.31. Heterogeneous identity.32. Actuality and possibility and identity.33. Possibilities of identity.34. Identity and Abstraction.35. Things that can complicate identity.36. Thisness and Essentialism.37. Egalitarian identity.38. Summary of Essentialist identity.PART FOURThe Space of Apprehension and the Field of Understanding39. Introduction.40. Circles, matrices, and the space of apprehension.41. Language and information in the Haecceities series.42. Comprehending specifications.43. The field of understanding.44. The algorithm, matrices, parts and wholes, and relationships.45. Ideational objects.PART FIVEEssentialist Determination of Some Limits of Abstraction and Kinds of Radical Identity: Selections from the Haecceities Series with Commentary46. The language of Essentialism, identity, and the limits of Abstraction.47. Haecceity 1.0.0.48. Haecceity 1.1.0.49. Haecceity 1.2.0.50. Haecceity 2.0.3.51. Haecceity 2.9.0.52. Haecceity 2.10.1.53. Haecceity 3.29.0.54. Haecceity 4.7.0.55. Haecceity 7.3.0.56. Haecceity 12.0.0.PART SIXAppendicesAppendix One: A Paradox of Identity?Appendix Two: Time and Understanding.Index