Office Hours

Monday, 12:30-14:00

 

Course Description

Monism and pluralism are competing views about how unified the cosmos is. According to monism, the existence of many beings (concrete particulars) is at most a derivative fact, deriving from the existence and nature of a single fundamental being; and perhaps it is not a fact at all, but an illusion, since there really is just one being. According to pluralism, on the other hand, at the very least there are many fundamental beings; and perhaps the cosmos is so disjointed that the many fundamental beings bear no substantive relation to one another.

The two positions have widely divergent implications for other philosophical questions, and the divide between monism and pluralism is perhaps one of the deepest and most significant metaphysical divides. (William James once called it “the most central of all philosophic problems, central because so pregnant.”) Presumably this partly explains the recurrence of the monism/pluralism debate at various points in the history of philosophy. And while the birth of analytic philosophy led to an almost total neglect of the issue for most of the twentieth century, the past few years have witnessed a resurgence of interest. In this course we will explore the debate through both historical works and contemporary readings.

 

Requirements:

• Final paper
• Attendance and Participation

 

Topics and Readings

[readings in brackets are suggested, not required]:

 

Week 1 (28/2): Introduction

1. William James, A Pluralistic Universe, Lecture II

2. Jonathan Schaffer, “Monism: The Priority of the Whole”

 

Week 2-4 (7/3, 14/3, 21/3): Radical Monism

1. Horgan and Potrc, “Blobjectivism and Indirect Correspondence”

2.  Della Rocca, “Spinoza’s Substance Monism”

3. Bennett, A Study of Spinoza’s Ethics, ch. 4 (not 3!)

4.  [Healey, “The World as We Know It”]

5. Bradley, Appearance and Reality, ch. 2-3

6.  Candlish, The Russell-Bradley Dispute, 167-73

7. Parsons, “Entension, or How it Could Happen...” sections 1-2

8. [Rea, “How to be an Eleatic Monist”]

 

Week 5-10: Moderate Monism

     Week 5-8: Arguments Pro

• Week 5 (28/3): Quantum Mechanics

1. Schaffer, “Monism: The Priority of the Whole,” sec. 2.2

2. Calosi, “Quantum Mechanics and Priority Monism”

• Week 6 (25/4): Possibility of Gunk

1. Schaffer, “Monism: The Priority of the Whole,” sec. 2.4
2. Brzozowski, “Monism and Gunk”
3. [Morganti, “Ontological Priority, Fundamentality, and Monism”]

• Week 7 (16/5): Dynamical Laws

1.  Schaffer, “The Action of the Whole”
2.  Miller, “Schaffer on the Action of the Whole”
3.  [Siegel, “Priority Monism is Contingent”]
4.  [Common Sense Schaffer, “Monism: The Priority of the Whole”, sec. 2.1
5.  Oconaill and Tahko, “On the Commonsense Argument for Monism”]

• Week 8 (23/5): Modal Constraints

1.  Schaffer, “The Internal Relatedness of all Things”
2.  [Segal, “Causal Essentialism and Mereological Monism”]
3.  Zimmerman, “A Recent Defense of Monism Based on the Internal Relatedness of all Things”

 

     Week 9: Argument Con

• Week 9 (6/6): Combinatorics

1. Sider, “Against Monism”
2. Cornell, “Monism and Statespace: a Reply to Sider”

 

Week 10 (13/6):

• Skype visit from Schaffer

1. Re-read Schaffer’s papers

 

Week 11-13:

• Week 11-12 (20/6, 27/6): Coherence/Rationality of Moderate Pluralism

1.  [Royce, The World and the Individual Lecture 3, sec. 5]
2.  van Inwagen, Metaphysics, 41-6
3.  Ewing, Idealism: A Critical Survey, ch. 4
4.  Segal, “Half-Hearted Humeanism”
5.  Segal, “Radical Pluralism”

 

Week 13 (date TBD): Rationality of Radical Pluralism

1. Segal, “Humeanism: Metaphysical and Epistemological”

 

Important Note about the Schedule: There will be no class on May 9th. We will schedule a makeup session.