Metascience (2011) 20:225–251 DOI 10.1007/s11016-010-9463-7 BOOK SYMPOSIUM The physics and metaphysics of identity and individuality Steven French and De´cio Krause: Identity in physics: A historical, philosophical, and formal analysis. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006, 440 pp, £68.00 HB Don Howard • Bas C. van Fraassen • Ota´vio Bueno • Elena Castellani • Laura Crosilla • Steven French • De´cio Krause Published online: 3 November 2010 Ó Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2010 Don Howard Steven French and De´cio Krause have written what bids fair to be, for years to come, the definitive philosophical treatment of the problem of the individuality of elementary particles in quantum mechanics (QM) and quantum-field theory (QFT). The book begins with a long and dense argument for the view that elementary particles are most helpfully regarded as non-individuals, and it concludes with an earnest attempt to develop a formal apparatus for describing such non-individual entities better suited to the task than our customary set theory. D. Howard (&) Department of Philosophy and Graduate Program in History and Philosophy of Science, University of Notre Dame, Notre Dame, IN 46556, USA e-mail:
[email protected] B. C. van Fraassen Philosophy Department, San Francisco State University, 1600 Holloway Avenue, San Francisco, CA 94132, USA e-mail:
[email protected] O. Bueno Department of Philosophy, University of Miami, Coral Gables, FL 33124, USA e-mail:
[email protected] E. Castellani Department of Philosophy, University of Florence, Via Bolognese 52, 50139 Florence, Italy e-mail: elena.castellani@unifi.it L. Crosilla Department of Pure Mathematics, School of Mathematics, University of Leeds, Leeds LS2 9JT, UK e-mail:
[email protected] 123 226 Metascience (2011) 20:225–251 Are elementary particles individuals? I do not know.