如怀特海所说,“哲学材料是现实世界,包括我们自己在内。”但是在西方思想史上,特别是在笛卡尔以后时期的思想史上,哲学家对“包括我们自己在内”的现实世界感到难以提出一个一般的描述。往往完全不考虑到个人——意思是说,个人并没有本体论的特征——要不然就把个人“归结”为某种被认做是更加基本的其它特征。苏格兰哲学家约翰·麦克缪雷(John Macmurray)在他过去三十年出版的全部著作中,却争辩着这个相反的命题,即个人实在 As Whitehead said, “The philosophical material is the real world, including ourselves.” But in the history of ideas in the West, especially in the post-Descartes history of thought, philosophers have turned to the real world “including ourselves” Feeling difficult to come up with a general description. Often individuals are not taken into account at all - meaning that an individual does not have the ontological character - or otherwise “subordinate” an individual to something else that is considered to be more fundamental. In his entire book, published in the last thirty years, the Scottish philosopher John Macmurray argues that the opposite proposition, the individual reality