The website for my old company, Individuality Ltd., used to live here but now the company is no more and I've decided to sell the domain since it's just gathering dust. It gets quite a lot of random hits from search engines and one day I might get around to putting up some traffic information.
Please send an email to domain at individuality dot com if you'd like to make me an offer.
What happened to Individuality Ltd.?
I used to be an IT contractor and I put my contracts through Individuality Ltd. rather than using an umbrella company. Now I've stopped doing traditional contract work and started doing fulltime freelance work through my new business, Rockfield Systems Web Development so I wound Individuality Ltd. up.
How long have you owned the domain?
I registered individuality.com in January 1997 when I was working for an ISP. My boss offered to let me register a domain name for free and I chose this one. I can't remember exactly why I picked individuality.com but it probably seemed like a good idea at the time and besides, I thought that owning any domain name would be pretty cool.
Can't you do something else with the domain instead?
I have a number of projects on the go at the moment and there aren't enough hours in the day for me to take on any more!
How much will you sell it for?
This is the only domain I've ever sold so I don't really know what to expect. A couple of hours research on various domain name brokerage sites has given me a very rough idea but really I'm open to any sensible offer. I'm not in a hurry to sell the domain because I'll only go and waste the money on gadgets anyway.
Who are you?
My name is Simon Starr and I'm a freelance Rails developer based in London, England.
What does Individuality mean, anyway?
Well, as commonly used, individual refers to a person or to any specific object in a collection. In the 15th century and earlier, and also today within the fields of statistics and metaphysics, individual means "indivisible", typically describing any numerically singular thing, but sometimes meaning "a person." (q.v. "The problem of proper names"). From the seventeenth century on, individual indicates separateness, as in individualism. Individuality is the state or quality of being an individual; a person separate from other persons and possessing his or her own needs, goals, and desires.
That's all very interesting but didn't Descartes have something to say on the matter?
Yes he did! In his statement Cogito ergo sum ("I think therefore I am"), Rene Descartes posits the notion the individual subject, distinct from the world around him or her. This is the most famous articulation of subject-object dualism in the Western philosophical tradition.
Can I get a second opinion? What did Hegel have to say about it?
I'm glad you asked. Hegel regarded history as the unfolding of God's plan through a process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. The role of the individual in this view was as an agent of this unfolding--a part of a greater whole.
What's the relationship between existentialism and the concept of Individuality?
With the rise of existentialism, Kierkegaard rejected Hegel's notion of the individual as subordinated to the forces of history. Instead, he elevated the individual's subjectivity and capacity to choose his or her own fate. Later Existentialists built upon this notion. Nietzsche, for example, examines the individual's need to define him/her own self and circumstances in his concept of the will to power and the heroic ideal of the Übermensch. The individual is also central to Sartre's philosophy, which emphasises individual authenticity, responsibility, and free will. In both Sartre and Nietzsche, the individual is called upon to create his or her own values, rather than rely on external, socially imposed codes of morality.
What about Buddhism and the interconnectedness of all things?
In Buddhism, the concept of the individual lies in anatman, or "no-self." According to anatman, the individual is really a series of interconnected processes that, working together, give the appearance of being a single, separated whole. In this way, anatman, together with anicca, resembles a kind of bundle theory. Instead of an atomic, indivisible self distinct from reality, the individual in Buddhism is understood as an interrelated part of an ever-changing, impermanent universe.
Hey! Didn't you just copy and paste all this stuff from Wikipedia?
Yep, I'm using it under the terms of the GNU Free Documentation Licence in an attempt to make this page more attractive to search engines.