Monism

Monism is the metaphysical view that there is only one principle, essence, substance or energy. Monism is to be distinguished from dualism, which holds that ultimately there are two principles, and from pluralism, which holds that ultimately there are many principles.

Types of monism

Monism is often seen as partitioned into three basic types:

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• Substantial Monism, (One thing) which holds that there is one substance.
• Attributive Monism, (One category) which holds that while is only one kind of thing but many different individual things or beings in this category.
• Absolute Monism, which holds that there is only one substance and only one being. Absolute Monism, therefore can only be of the idealistic type (see below)

Monism is further defined according to three kinds:

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• Idealism or phenomenalism, which holds that only mind is real.
• Neutral monism, which holds that both the mental and the physical can be reduced to some sort of third substance, or energy
• Physicalism or materialism, which holds that only the physical is real, and that the mental can be reduced to the physical.

Certain other positions are hard to pigeonhole into the above categories, including:

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• Functionalism, like materialism, holds that the mental can ultimately be reduced to the physical, but also holds that all critical aspects of the mind are also reducible to some substrate-neutral "functional" level. Thus something need not be made out of neurons to have mental states. This is a popular stance in cognitive science and artificial intelligence.
• Eliminativism, which holds that talk of the mental will eventually be proved as unscientific and completely discarded. Just as we no longer follow the ancient Greeks in saying that all matter is composed of earth, air, water, and fire, people of the future will no longer speak of "beliefs", "desires", and other mental states. A subcategory of eliminativism is radical behaviourism, a view held by B. F. Skinner.)
• Anomalous monism, a position proposed by Donald Davidson in the 1970s as a way to resolve the Mind-body problem. It could be considered (by the above definitions) either physicalism or neutral monism. Davidson holds that here is only physical matter, but that all mental objects and events are perfectly real and are identical with (some) physical matter. But physicalism retains a certain priority, inasmuch as (1) All mental things are physical, but not all physical things are mental, and (2) (As John Haugeland puts it) Once you take away all the atoms, there's nothing left. This monism was widely considered an advance over previous identity theories of mind and body, because it does not entail that one must be able to provide an actual method for redescribing any particular kind of mental entity in purely physical terms. Indeed there may be no such method; this is a case of nonreductive physicalism, or perhaps emergent physicalism/materialism.