What is priority monism?
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What is priority monism? David Mark Kovacs1
Accepted: 28 October 2020 Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Abstract In a series papers, Jonathan Schaffer defended priority monism, the thesis that the cosmos is the only fundamental material object, on which all other objects depend. A primitive notion of dependence plays a crucial role in Schaffer’s arguments for priority monism. The goal of this paper is to scrutinize this notion and also to shed new light on what is at stake in the debate. I present three familiar arguments for priority monism and point out that each relies on a connecting principle that ties dependence to other metaphysical relations. I then argue for two desiderata: the relation between dependence and other metaphysical relations needs to be strong enough to establish that other metaphysical relations are relevant to the direction of dependence but not so strong as to leave no room for revisionary versions of priority monism. I propose a particular way of meeting these desiderata, according to which the target notion of dependence is graded rather than all-or-nothing. One upshot is that we should be less preoccupied with priority monism itself and should instead focus on specific aspects of a broader monistic worldview.
In a series of papers, Schaffer (2010a, b, c, 2013) defends priority monism, the thesis that the cosmos is the only fundamental material object on which all other objects depend (more on the exact formulation in Sect. 1).1 Over the years Schaffer offered several arguments for priority monism, which appeal to substantive theses about the 1
It can be gathered from Schaffer’s many scattered remarks that he uses the word ‘cosmos’ as shorthand for the definite description ‘the most inclusive mereological sum’. This is how I will use the word throughout the paper, too.
& David Mark Kovacs [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University, Gilman 363, Ramat Aviv, 6997801 Tel Aviv, Israel
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D. M. Kovacs
relation between dependence and other metaphysical relations (necessitation, parthood, nomic subsumption, etc.). I don’t intend to take a stance on the soundness of these arguments. Instead, I want to get clear on how to understand the relation between the relevant notion of dependence and these other relations. My conclusion will be that the target notion is best understood as admitting of degree, rather than as all-or-nothing. That is, perhaps somewhat counter-intuitively, we can ask not only whether all other concrete objects depend on the cosmos, but also to what extent they depend on it. This finding has an interesting upshot: what is really at stake in the debate between priority monism and priority pluralism is a general monistic worldview, but this worldview cannot simply be identified with the official doctrine of priority monism. This suggests that we would do well to be less concerned with priority monism itself and should instead focus on specific aspects of the worldview. The rest of the paper will proceed as follows. In Sect. 1, I will give a mor
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