What is the point of philosophy? One significant role that philosophy can play is to prompt us to take a step back from our everyday assumptions to a broader perspective in which alternative possibilities can come into view. One can then first wonder about why our assumptions are the way they are.

Take the Atlantic Ocean – how is it the individual object that it is? How is it that this particular expanse of water is distinguished from others spatially contiguous to it and given the status of an entity, a thing, an object? What about all the infinite number of regions of water that the Atlantic Ocean could be carved up into? Why aren’t they themselves oceans, seas, things?

Whatever answer one gives to these questions, the questions themselves invite one to reflect that the objecthood of the Atlantic Ocean is a result, a product, a consequence, of some “individuating operation” and thus that it is not a brute, ultimate fact that the Atlantic Ocean is an individual thing. Such “individuating operations” are probably well construed with reference to human needs, desires, aims, goals, etc.

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"Philosophy calls into question whether the descriptions of even the most rigorous 'theory of everything' get a grip on a reality."
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But the object of the Atlantic Ocean is not unique in this dependency on human representation, on a human “ontological scheme”. The same considerations apply in principle to all other individuated entities, including so-called “fundamental particles”, laws, constellations, stars, black holes, events, forces, etc. They call into question whether the descriptions of even the most rigorous “theory of everything” get a grip on a reality that is beyond the individuation operations, on a reality that is not yet subject to an ontological scheme.