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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