Monism

Jump to:navigation, search

Previous (Mongoose)

Next (Monitor lizard)

The term monism (from the Greek: μόνος monos or "one")—first used by the eighteenth-century German philosopher Christian Wolff to designate philosophical positions asserting either that everything is mental (idealism) or that everything is material (materialism), in order to eliminate the dichotomy of mind and body—has more general applicability today, maintaining that all of reality is ultimately one and indivisible. Two types of monism are usually understood to exist: "substantival" and "attributive" monism. Substantival monism, which is represented by religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism in the East and philosophers such as Baruch Spinoza in the West, holds that the entirety of reality is reducible to only one substance, and that any diversity of reality means just a plurality of aspects or modes of this one substance. By contrast, attributive monism maintains that there is only one category of being, within which there are many different individual things or substances. Attributive monism is further subdivided into three types: idealism, materialism (or physicalism), and neutral monism, and they have shown alternative positions for the discussion of the mind-body problem. 

Contents

• 1 Types of Monism
  • 1.1 Related terms
• 2 Philosophical Monism
  • 2.1 Greek roots
  • 2.2 Modern variations
• 3 Monism in Religion
  • 3.1 Hinduism
  • 3.2 Buddhism
  • 3.3 Daoism
  • 3.4 Judaism
  • 3.5 Islam
  • 3.6 Christianity
• 4 Monism and the Problem of Evil
• 5 Significance of Monism
• 6 Notes
• 7 References
• 8 See also
• 9 External links
• 10 Credits

The quest for oneness has been an important, universal drive and impulse throughout human history, culture, and religious and philosophical thought. Here lies the attractiveness of monism, which subsumes all diversity and heterogeneity into one larger holistic category without internal divisions, although its overemphasis on oneness has also prevented it from being accepted especially in the mainstream culture and religion in the West.

https://www.newworldencyclopedia.org/entry/Monism