Monism

Abstract

Historically, the question of whether reality is one or many has divided Parmenides and Democritus, Spinoza and Leibniz, Hegel and Russell. Plato predicted that the problem “will assuredly never cease to exist” (Philebus 15d), and James declared it “the most central of all philosophical problems, central because so pregnant... To believe in the one or the many, that is the classification with the maximum number of consequences” (1991: 58).