Ontological Individualism Defended

Abstract

The paper defends ontological individualism from a prominent challenge: that certain social properties depend on “non-individualistic” physical factors. I propose two responses to show that this challenge fails to undermine the thesis of ontological individualism. First, I argue that it uses an implausible interpretation of physical things to call them “non-individualistic.” Second, I raise some doubts regarding whether the challenge leads to an overly permissive dependence of social properties on physical objects in social-scientific explanations.