Bertrand Russell’s conception of neutral monism

Neutral monism reconsidered

combinatorial relations between them simply come along for free. Which among all these abstract possibilities are concretely instantiated by physics, for example by genuine causal connections between objects? Russell readily admitted this criticism (Demopoulos & Friedman, 1989; Seager, 2006), but Newman is actually endorsing Russell’s real proposal for an enhanced physicalism, in which causal d...

Russell and the Metaphysics of Neutral Monism

Monism: The Priority of theWhole

Consider a circle and a pair of its semicircles. Which is prior, the whole or its parts? Are the semicircles dependent abstractions from their whole, or is the circle a derivative construction from its parts? Now in place of the circle consider the entire cosmos (the ultimate concrete whole), and in place of the pair of semicircles consider themyriad particles (the ultimate concrete parts).Whic...

Tathāgatagarbha, Emptiness, and Monism

The tathāgatagarbha doctrine is one of the most significant Buddhist doctrines to have come under the scrutiny of scholars in recent times. One of the more interesting aspects of this doctrine is that it focuses attention on the nature of the Buddhist “absolute” or highest truth in such a way as to make clear many of the problems and concerns of the Buddhist community after the advent of the do...

Monism and Material Constitution

Are the sculpture and the mass of gold which permanently makes it up one object or two? In this paper, we argue that the monist, who answers ‘one object’, cannot accommodate the asymmetry of material constitution. To say ‘the mass of gold materially constitutes the sculpture, whereas the sculpture does not materially constitute the mass of gold’, the monist must treat ‘materially constitutes’ a...