monism

View that attributes oneness or singleness to a concept

Concepttheory concept philosophical theoryQ178801

Instance of: theory
, concept
, philosophical theory
+2 more
Subclass of: metaphysics

Overview

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia · Read full article · Text CC BY-SA 4.0

Monism attributes oneness or singleness to a concept, such as existence. Primarily used in philosophy, the term sometimes overlaps with nondualism. Various kinds of monism can be distinguished:Priority monism states that all existing things go back to a source that is distinct from them; e.g., in Neoplatonism everything is derived from the One. In this view, only the One is ontologically fundamental or prior to everything else. Existence monism posits that, strictly speaking, there exists only a single thing, the universe, which can only be artificially and arbitrarily divided into many things. Substance monism asserts that a variety of existing things can be explained in terms of a single reality or substance. Substance monism posits that only one kind of substance exists, although many things may be made up of this substance, e.g., matter or mind. Dual-aspect monism is the view that the mental and the physical are two aspects of, or perspectives on, the same substance. Neutral monism believes the fundamental nature of reality to be neither mental nor physical; in other words it is "neutral". Political monism is sometimes used to describe political concepts, such as unitarianism, based on certain principles like ethnicity or identity.

Overview

All data

52 statements · 21% with external sources · numbers in brackets are citations

Followed by: dualism
Different from: monad
Opposite of: pluralism
Members / parts: idealism
neutral monism
materialism
Partially coincident with: indivisibility
Permanent duplicated item: Q60978420
Facet of: philosophy

On other databases

33 identifiers linking monism across the web's reference databases

Data quality

statements

21%

externally sourced

Source last edited October 27, 2026. AIDb refreshes this page daily.

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AIDb. (2026). monism (Q178801). Retrieved from https://aidb.si/e/monism-Q178801