What is priority monism? Reply to Kovacs

Abstract

Priority monism is the view that the cosmos is the basic concrete entity on which each of its parts depends. Kovacs has recently argued that none of the classical notions of dependence could be used to spell out priority monism. I argue that four notions of dependence – namely rigid existential dependence, generic existential dependence, explanatory dependence, and generalised explanatory dependence – can indeed be used to spell out priority monism and specify the conditions under which this is possible.