Abstract

This book’s main thesis is that considerations about monism figure importantly in the contemporary mind-body debate. In short, monism matters. The book begins by clarifying the relevant sort of monism, explaining the monism-matters thesis, and placing that thesis in historical context (Chapter 1). Then three arguments against the monism-matters thesis are formulated and rejected (Chapter 2). Then seven arguments for the monism-matters thesis are developed and defended (Chapters 3–6). Then the book zooms in on the question of how best to define the physicalist version of monism, including a new proposal for how to understand what it means to be physical (Chapters 7 and 8). The book ends by discussing another implication of physicalism’s monist commitments. Those commitments, it is argued, complicate attempts to reconcile physicalism with moral realism (Chapter 9).