Me and my colleague from Durham, Donnchadh O’Conaill, have been working on a joint paper entitled Priority Monism and Conceptual Pluralism for a Palgrave-Macmillan volume, Spinoza on Monism, edited by Philip Goff. The paper is now at the stage where we could use some feedback. It still needs some polishing and digging up references etc., but all the main content is now in place. We would hope to get some comments by December so we have some time to revise the paper accordingly. Any input would be appreciated! The abstract is below, click the previous link for the full paper.

The priority monist holds that the whole is prior to its parts, that the cosmos is the only fundamental object. One major argument against monism goes back to Russell, who claimed that pluralism is favoured by commonsense. However, as Jonathan Schaffer argues, Russell’s case against monism is based on a misinterpretation: (priority) monism does not suggest that only one thing exists, but rather that only one thing is fundamental. Even if commonsense suggests that in some cases the parts are prior to the whole, there may be other cases where the whole is prior to the parts. Accordingly, Schaffer turns the commonsense argument to its head and uses it to defend priority monism. We wish to challenge one premise of his argument, namely that the many proper parts of the cosmos are merely arbitrary portions of it. We suggest that there is a way of carving up the universe which is not (entirely) arbitrary. Two arguments in favour of this position will be offered: an ontological and a semantic one. The upshot of this paper is a clear challenge for Schaffer’s defence of priority monism against the commonsense argument. If we are right, it seems that the commonsense argument can stand its ground.