Neutral monism
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Neutral monism, in philosophy, is the metaphysical view that the mental and the physical are two ways of organizing or describing the very same elements, which are themselves "neutral," that is, neither physical nor mental. This view denies that the mental and the physical are two fundamentally different things. Rather, neutral monism claims the universe consists of only one kind of stuff, in the form of neutral elements that are in themselves neither mental nor physical. These neutral elements are like sensory experiences: they might have the properties of color and shape, just as we experience those properties. But these shaped and colored elements do not exist in a mind (considered as a substantial entity, whether dualistically or physicalistically); they exist on their own.
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[edit] History
Some of the first views of the mind-body relationship in philosophy can be attributed to C.D Broad who in one of his early works known simply as Broad's famous list of 1925 stated the basis of what this theory was to become, no less then nine of seventeen of his mind-body relationship theories are now classified as falling under the category of Neutral monism. There are considerably few self-proclaimed neutral monists, most of the philosophers who are seen to have this view were classified after their deaths. Some examples of this are Baruch Spinoza (1632-77), David Hume (1711-1776), Ernst Mach (1838-1916), Richard Avenarius (1843-96) and Joseph Petzoldt (1862-1929)
[edit] William James
Some subset of these elements form individual minds: the subset of just the experiences that you have for the day, which are accordingly just so many neutral elements that follow upon one another, is your mind as it exists for that day. If instead you described the elements that would constitute the sensory experience of rock by the path, then those elements constitute that rock. They do so even if no one observes the rock. The neutral elements exist, and our minds are constituted by some subset of them, and that subset can also be seen to constitute a set of empirical observations of the objects in the world. All of this, however, is just a matter of grouping the neutral elements in one way or another, according to a physical or a psychological (mental) perspective. James propounded it in his essay "Does Consciousness Exist?" in 1904 (reprinted in Essays in Radical Empiricism in 1912).[1] Bertrand Russell later adopted this position.[2]
In strict parlance, neutral monism should be distinguished from dual-aspect monism, which holds that all existence consists of one kind (hence monism) of primal substance, which in itself is neither mental nor physical, but is capable of distinct mental and physical aspects or attributes that are two faces of the same underlying reality in the one substance.
Emergent materialism is another form of metaphysical monism that respects both mind and matter.
[edit] See also
[edit] References and notes
[edit] Sources
- "Monism". Columbia Encyclopedia. Columbia University Press. 2008. http://education.yahoo.com/reference/encyclopedia/entry/monism. Retrieved on 2008-09-23.
