Ethical Ontology, Volume I: The Modal Coincidence

Description: Ethical Ontology, Volume I: The Modal Coincidence is the first volume of the Ethical Ontology programme's systematic series, following Positive No-Ground: The Common and the Locus of Answerability (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21628405). Its central claim is that who is a modal category of being: not a moral status, a psychological or social kind, or a persona, but a way in which being obtains, distinguished from other ways by a stated differentia. A who is determined as a modal coincidence: an open, regionally articulable manner of being obtaining as this finite, embodied, historical occurrence, in a whole that was never assembled from parts. The categorial differentia is ownness: the whole coincidence obtains as someone rather than merely something, and the character doing the categorial work within it is non-vicariousness: this own obtaining cannot be undergone in another's place. The differentia cuts the category without ranking its instances: no who is more a who than another, no primary case holds the standing of the rest, and the category itself is a hinge, not a summit: it commands nothing. The book presents itself as a positively articulated a-metaphysical ontology: its categories are reached from regional trials, and the metaphysical principle is required neither as premise nor as negated opposite. The book proceeds by trials rather than definition: the adult, the newborn, the sleeper, the person with dementia, the cat, the machine, and the dead are entered as trials, not illustrations, and the instrument's losses are printed: the feline region restricted it, the machine returned an open verdict under a rule written against the free negative, and a burned canvas returned a verdict against the instrument itself. Eight parts carry the argument through access, deictic determination, the modal character of being, categorial singularity, time and interruption, the regions, the sacred, and freedom and keeping. The novelty claims are two, and each is deposited with its defeater. First, the determination of the who as a modal category of being: a way in which being obtains, in the register in which substance is distinguished from mode or the living from the non-living, rather than as a substance-kind, an act-unity, a moral status, or a division of the world into persons and things; a text in which the who is reached as a modal category of being in that register defeats it. Second, non-vicariousness reached ontologically, as the differentia of that category; a text in which the same result is reached in the same register ends it outright. The second claim presupposes the first: a defeat of the first by a text carrying a different differentia leaves the second standing alone. The formal statement of the theory is The Calculus of Modal Coincidence (DOI 10.5281/zenodo.21497200). The complete text is also available at ethicalontology.org/books/ethical-ontology-volume-i with SHA-256 verification.