Sense-data (Part Five)

15Apr07

Section Five: Monism  

While in the last section we discussed idealism -in particular the critique of idealism offered by
Moore- the time has come to deal with monism. Which Russell admits was a motivating factor in his early work, as he admits in My Philosophical Development: “I think
Moore was most concerned with the rejection of idealism, while I was most interested in the rejection of monism. (54)” As it has been stated before; monism is the belief at its most basic level that the entire world is reducible to a single substance (substance monism). An example would be idealism and materialism. But there is a more extreme form of monism that claims everything is reducible to a certain type of object, or category of objects (attributive monism). An example would be Leibniz’s monads, which not only share in common the fact that they are mental, but also the fact that they are all “souls”. But, yet again, there is still a more extreme form of monism that is the belief that everything is not reducible to the same substance, and the same category, but inevitably to the very same object. So in the end there only exists a single entity. This is what is known as absolute monism, of which pantheism is a type.

All (or most) of this would be refuted by AFI2/C1, because AFI2/C1 establishes the existence of physical entities and non-physical entities. Which I believe was a motivating factor for Russell. Who wanted desperately to do away with monism, but it is AFI2 coupled with C1 that, I think, in the end makes AFI2 invalid. So in the grand scheme of things this is important because while AFI2 coupled with C1 disprove monism. ARI1 coupled with C2 does not disprove monism. Which is good (because it doesn’t threaten materialism or at least not monism), but is also bad because if the objection isn’t derived from AFI2/C1 it seems to leave open the possibility for idealism. Because AFI2/C1 claims two types of substances, while AFI1/C2 claims only one type of substance. And while this is good for materialism, it is almost just as good for idealism. The final resolution of the dispute seems to come down to Ockham’s razor.

Summary

The section provided support for the claim that Russell was motivated by a rejection of monism, and described what monism is (belief in one substance… category… or thing). It concluded with an analysis of how AFI1 & AFI2 and C1 & C2 were related to this issue, making note of the fact that while AFI2/C1 rejects monism, AFI1/C2 not only does not reject monism but does not reject idealism directly.

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