This paper seeks to explore the way Giovanni Pico della Mirandola treated the Orphics and the Pythagoreans in his Conclusiones nongentae, his early and most ambitious work, so that he formulates his own philosophy. I do not intend to present and analyze the sum of Pico’s references to Orphics and Pythagoreans, since such an attempt is beyond the scope of this paper. Rather, I aim to highlight certain Pico’s aphorisms that allow readers to understand and evaluate his syncretic method and (...) his goals. In addition, I attempt to trace Pico’s sources and evaluate his proper knowledge, understanding and treatment of the Orphics and the Pythagoreans. Pico resorts to the Orphics and the Pythagoreans because he wants to give a practical and applied dimension to his philosophy. He attempted the revival of the original wisdom that underlies the traditions he combined. He was not a fan of the Aristotelian θεωρίης ἢνεκεν. Philosophy does not aim at proper knowledge, but is the key for the manipulation of the cosmos, physically and metaphysically speaking. Pico probably thinks of himself as the modern Orpheus: he does not intend to reveal the paths which cross the sensible and the intelligible, but he aspires to tread them. (shrink)

Metaphysical explanations, unlike many other kinds of explanation, are standardly thought to be insensitive to our epistemic situation and so are not evaluable by cognitive values such as salience. I consider a case study that challenges this view. Some properties are distributed over an extension. For example, the property of being polka-dotted red on white, when instantiated, is distributed over a surface. Similar properties have been put to work in a variety of explanatory tasks in recent metaphysics, including: providing an (...) analysis of change, giving to presentists truthmakers for past claims; giving to priority monists an account of basic heterogeneous entities; and giving to friends of extended simples an explanation of how an extended simple can enjoy qualitative variation. I argue that such explanations exhibit salience failure. How ought we represent the semantics of salience? Differences in linguistic stress induce semantic differences similar to the semantic differences induced in explanations by differences in salience, and I will draw an analogy with linguistic theories of focus sensitivity to sketch how one might model the role of salience in these kinds of explanations. I end with a few tentative conclusions about the role of cognitive values in metaphysical explanations. Some theorists view the citation of a ground as a sufficient explanation. If certain explanations appealing to distributed properties exhibit attenuated salience, then arguably the mere citation of a ground does not always provide an adequate explanation. (shrink)

Existence monism (EM) is a metaphysical view asserting the existence of only one concrete object. EM is well known for its radicalness, and encounters difficulty in terms of its prima facie inconsistency with truisms. This paper aims to propose an alternative (and somewhat easy) way to overcome this difficulty and indicate another means by which the possibility of EM can be defended. I will present a package of theses that are intended to be combined with EM, which I call Linguistic (...) Ontology with the One as Semantic Glue (LOOSG). I will show that this package (in combination with EM) provides a systematic explanation as to why truisms hold while only one concrete object actually exists. In other words, I will argue that if an existence monist embraces LOOSG, the desired explanation for truisms is then available to her. In addition, it will also be noted that LOOSG has a theoretical virtue, in that it only presupposes the framework of standard semantics. Based on these discussions, I offer LOOSG as a viable option for existence monism. (shrink)

What is the relationship between objects and properties? According to a standard view, there are primitive individuals that ‘instantiate’ or ‘have’ various properties. According to a rival view, objects are mere ‘bundles’ of properties. While there are a number of reasons to be skeptical of primitive individuals, there are also a number of challenges that the bundle theorist faces. The goal of this paper is to formulate a view about the relationship between objects and properties that avoids many of the (...) problems inherent in both of these views. The view I will end up defending implies a particularly radical version of Monism, and it collapses the object-property distinction altogether. (shrink)

This article describes the ultimate ground of reality, Brahman, as a single power unfolding in concert in all things. It uses counterfactual argumentation to imply that a cosmos must consist of telic causal orders or manifested ‘powers’ as its most granular building block – and that they must be unified into a single whole. It is based on an argument for a single causally-conditioning substrate of all things recorded in India’s classical Sāṃkhya Kārikā and Brahma Sūtras; this was used by (...) scholastic Vedāntic thinkers including the non-dualist Śaṃkara and the ‘transformationist’ Bhedābheda thinker Śrīnivāsa. It takes up arguments for satkārya, the pre-existence of a thing’s various transformations in potentio within its substrate, and employs them to paint a picture of reality as an ordered yet entangled pattern of causal trajectories. These manifest as the changing world we know. While Vedānta’s main motivation for making the arguments was to prove monism, this conception of an ‘immanent cause’ of all was also seen as divine. We see how this accords with moves in contemporary analytic philosophy to shift away from a broadly Humean model of constant conjunctions (reminiscent of key Buddhist approaches) toward a Neo-Aristotelian ‘metaphysics of powers’. But we also indicate how it may go further than most modern powers-metaphysicians in proposing a deeper connection between powers and what it is for there to be a cosmos at all. (shrink)

Priority monism has been criticised on the grounds that monists cannot give an informative story about how the world is heterogeneous: how can there be qualitative variation in the world, given we cannot explain the world’s qualitative variation in terms of its proper parts? I will argue that none of the traditional solutions to this problem are plausible, and instead argue that we should hold that what accounts for the world’s heterogeneity is that the Cosmos is identical to the collective (...) plurality of all the world’s tropes, and each individual trope, in the plurality, is non-distributively grounded in the plurality/bundle of all the world’s tropes. I go onto note that as well as providing a solution to the monistic problem of heterogeneity, this view – which I call (PUT) – could well be a promising trope bundle theory in its own right. (shrink)

This entry focuses on two of the more historically important monisms: existence monism and priority monism . Existence monism targets concrete objects and counts by tokens. This is the doctrine that exactly one concrete object exists. Priority monism also targets concrete objects, but counts by basic tokens. This is the doctrine that exactly one concrete object is basic, which will turn out to be the classical doctrine that the whole is prior to its parts.

The Idea of a unified foundation of all reality has long been core to many attempts at a fundamental ontology, as well as many arguments for the divine. In medieval India a cluster of arguments for metaphysical inheritance, causal entanglement, the impossibility of fundamental relations and more, were advanced together to show there must be an ultimate and unified ground. But foundationalism has been under attack in both recent metaphysics, and Buddhist philosophy. This article unpacks Vedānta’s defense of divine foundationalism (...) against Madhyamaka Buddhism’s metaphysical nihilism. Firstly, we look at how inheritance arguments for ultimate ground aimed to circumvent the possibility of infinite regress. Secondly, we assess three arguments that this ground is a unified modal anchor, with entangled causal power, providing a connective medium for all phenomena. We address some caveats and limitations, but go on to argue that if they are right, they circumvent the Buddhists’ ‘dualistic’ assumption that if the empirical world is mere imagined convention, it needs no explanation. Monists and nihilists are allies against excessively realist ontologies, but these arguments make a compelling case for some unified fundamental nature from which, as the Upaniṣads put it, all things emerge like sparks from a fire. (shrink)

If there is something non-reducible to anything else, self-existent, unsusceptible to further explanation, then in what sense might it befundamental, and in what sense might it beunified? In my response to Kerry McKenzie and Peter Adamson, I try to clarify the idea of “foundation” that these arguments claim to show, by first contrasting two conceptions of fundamentality (a concrete complete bottom level from which the world isbuilt up –the kind people often have in mind, and an ultimate modal determination thatexplainsthings), (...) and then discussing McKenzie’s main worry that what is modally irreducible does not necessarily qualify as fundamental, and Adamson’s worry that the bottom-level entities need not be numerically single. (shrink)