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Here we review the philosophical implications of the theory presented in previous chapters, and its consequences for future research. This leads us to demarcate the current theory from classical positions such as dualism, materialism, and functionalism. We discuss dualist arguments such as the case of philosophical 'zombies'. However, while these seem conceivable, they are argued not to be realizable: the construction of neural machinery appropriate for zombies would inevitably give rise to consciousness. Following a discussion of Jackson’s argument on “Mary the Color Scientist”, the reality of phenomenal experience is acknowledged as much as the reality of neural levels of processing, placing the theory away from eliminative materialism and classic functionalism. This characterizes the theory as a non-reductive, multilevel, neurobiological form of representationalism ('neurorepresentationalism'). Although representationalists have not been typically concerned with the problem of how neural aggregates give rise to consciousness, the “externalist” stream in this school is much more distant from the current view than the “narrow” stream emphasizing that representations are generated in and by the brain. Finally, we discuss consciousness in animals and in human-made inventions such as computers and robots, and on future treatment of disorders of consciousness.

This chapter begins by considering the ways in which history and historical writing can be understood in pluralist terms. Drawing on the writings of Isaiah Berlin, it examines pluralism as it applies to whole cultures (cultural pluralism), as well as pluralism as it applies to historical methodology (methodological pluralism). It then places the historian Herodotus in his proper intellectual context, looking at links with his Ionian predecessors, the sophist Protagoras, and the tragedian Sophocles. Finally, the chapter touches upon the relationship between Herodotus and the other best‐known Classical Greek historian, Thucydides. The monism of the younger writer as it manifests itself in his scientific history and tendency toward reduction is analysed in detail.

The genealogy of critique, received wisdom unequivocally maintains, started with Immanual Kant. Religion as Critique, in contrast, contends that it began much earlier. As a prelude to demonstrate this proposition and enable readers to begin to rethink the whole issue of critique afresh, the prologue presents Shah Valiullah’s (1703 —1763) work as an exemplification of critique preceding, as well as different from, Kant’s. In the precinct of Kaʿba and Prophet Muhammad’s mosque—Hijaz at large—generally construed as the place of mere submission beyond reason and an uncritical devotion to God, Valiullah enacts argumentation and discussion (baḥaṡ). In so doing, he assigns a role to himself—namely to judge one of the meanings of critique as Reinhart Koselleck outlines it. In Valiullah’s text, traces of a Cartesian split or conflict between reason and faith, between heart and mind, between interior and exterior are difficult to fathom; they instead form a connected ensemble. And unlike Kant, who viewed Islam (and other religions) as fanaticism and bestowed rationality solely on Protestant Christianity, for Valiullah Islam was already rational, not in spite of, but due to revelation.

The influence of the Counter-Enlightenment has not been entirely nihilistic and rejectionist. It has deeply influenced Isaiah Berlin, one of the chief apostles of liberal political theory in the twentieth century. Berlin hoped to infuse what he saw as the rationalism and universalism of the Enlightenment with the Counter-Enlightenment’s emphasis on individuality, self-expression, moral diversity or what he called “value pluralism.” These ideas were best expressed by German romantics like Herder but can also be found in writers like Vico, Montesquieu, and Hume. Berlin saw moral and political life as torn between competing and irreconcilable values that applied also to nations and cultures each of which contains morally distinctive ways of life. It was this awareness that not all values are compatible and that life is a matter of choice between competing goods that gives his liberalism both a tragic and a heroic dimension.

The interiorisation of ritual is a concept used by Indologists, referring to the replacement of the actual performance of ritual by its internal or mental performance, or to the adoption of the terminology and structure of ritual to describe an internal or mental transition. This chapter extends its use to ancient Greece. In India interiorisation arises from the discernible individualisation of sacrifice. In Greece the language and structure of mystic initiation is used by Heraclitus, Parmenides, and Plato to describe the intellectual progress of the individual. In both cultures interiorisation is associated with the advent of monism and the concomitant all-importance of the inner self. It is suggested that an important factor making for this development in both cultures was monetisation.

This chapter applies to Indian and Greek religion the typology of religious movements created by Roy Wallis: world-affirming, world-rejecting, and world accommodating religions. World-affirming religion is exemplifed in Greece by polis religion and the practice of magic, in India by karma (action), in which the world is controlled by ritual. World-rejecting religion is exemplified in both cultures by the attempt to find a supreme principle behind the world of appearances. World-accommodating religion is exemplified by the theurgy of Iamblichus and (much earlier) the individual religiosity of Socrates, and in India by bhakti: what is in the world is ussed for the service of a transcendent but personal deity.

Chapter 1 discusses José Vasconcelos’s notion of a cosmic race through a posthuman reading of his seminal essay The Cosmic Race [La raza cósmica] (1925) and his largely forgotten play Prometeo vencedor (1916?). Because Vasconcelos and his Ateneo colleagues were all famously antipositivist, they were suspicious of scientific discourses that purported to hold a monopoly on the “truth.” However, they also lived in a twentiethcentury society in which scientific discourse had gained intellectual hegemony. My chapter begins by asserting science as one of many discourses that compose Vasconcelos’s philosophy of Aesthetic Monism, which subordinates human knowledge to an overriding aesthetic imperative. Afterwards I use a close reading of Prometeo vencedor to assert the key role of science—especially in the guise of technology—in establishing both a worldwide mestizo society and a spiritual, posthuman superation of the body.

In the second chapter I explain the nature of immanent cause in Spinoza. I discuss and criticize the German Idealists’ acosmist interpretation of Spinoza according to which Spinoza revived the radical monism of the Eleatics and assigned no genuine reality to modes. Finally, I draw a crucial distinction, implicit in Spinoza's text, between modes of particular attributes, and modes under all attributes.

This chapter articulates what contemporary philosophers are asking when enquiring into the meaning of life, or what the concept of meaning in life is that unites competing conceptions of it. The chapter mainly examines three major monist proposals, according to which a theory is about meaning in life just insofar as it addresses: purposiveness, as per G. E. Moore and Kai Nielsen; transcendence, as suggested by Robert Nozick; or the aptness of emotions such as admiration and esteem, ò la Charles Taylor. Each of these three ideas is shown to capture a large array of theoretical work in the philosophical literature, but not to capture everything. The chapter concludes that a pluralist, family resemblance model is most defensible at this point.

This chapter focuses on two unconventional claims regarding the free will problem. The first contends that the systematical integration of the partial but crucial insights both of compatibilism and of hard determinism must be achieved so that one ultimately becomes a compatibilist hard determinist, and the second insists on a central role played by illusion in the free will problem, one which is mostly positive. The former argues that philosophers should be free from the so-called “Assumption of Monism,” which forces one to choose between compatibilism and hard determinism. This will make it possible to explore when, how, and how much of each side can be integrated to form a better argument. The latter, on the other hand, argues the centrality of illusion, which has been, for the most part, overlooked.

Against a growing consensus that Descartes was a closet monist committed to the idea that the divisions between bodies were either modal or phenomenal, this chapter argues that Descartes held to the doctrine of actual parts and real distinctions within a plurality of extended substances. Four arguments for the monistic reading are addressed and arguments both textual and conceptual advanced for a pluralist reading. These four arguments for monism are: the argument from the incoherence of infinitely divisible substances; the argument from the absence of substantial forms; the argument against individuation by motion; and the argument from the unreality of motion. Contrary to this trend, we argue that if the concept of body is to serve the purposes of a finite Cartesian physics, there had better be real divisions between individual bodies or extended substances. Alternative interpretations of those passages which seem to suggest otherwise are advanced.

Various structuralists about individuals, such as ontic structural realists and ante rem mathematical structuralists, say that individuals are "just positions in structures". This chapter is a long study of what that might mean. Individuals are central to the foundations of mathematics and physics, so it is hard to see how the fundamental facts could be stated without reference to individuals. But if these fundamental facts do mention individuals, then it is hard to see how individuals are "just positions in structures". The main approaches considered are: antihaecceitism, eliminative structural realism, featureless particulars (moderate structural realism), weak discernibility, indeterminate identity, monism, generalism. Especially close attention is paid to Shamik Dasgupta's development of the final position.

Zeno’s argument against plurality in the Parmenides does not support the view that there is only one object in the world—only the view that every object in the world is one. Socrates counters that every sensible object can be many by participating in Forms, but none of the Forms can be many. Parmenides retorts that participation is not consistent with the Forms’ unity. The dialectic Parmenides offers derives a series of contradictions from supposing either that each Form is one or that it is many (that is, qualified by any other feature). The implicit solution is that participation must allow the Forms to participate in one another without losing their essential unity. The net result, central to the Academy’s educational programme, is to articulate, for the first time, the concept of predication as we understand it today. Its results are summarized in the Sophist’s discussion of ‘Greatest Kinds’.

Mormonism maintains that matter and spirit are not just similarly eternal—they are ultimately two manifestations of the same reality or substance. The consequence in Smith’s thought is a collapse of the radical divide between body and spirit, the earthy and the heavenly. This contravenes the dualism prevalent in Western metaphysics, from Plato through Paul, to Descartes. Some notable exceptions have occurred from the ancients to the present, including John Milton and the Cambridge Platonists. Smith propounded cosmological monism in 1833, and it was first elaborated by Parley P. Pratt, who wrote that “God the Father, is material. Jesus Christ is material. Angels are material. Spirits are material. Men are material. The universe is material. . . . Nothing exists which is not material.” One important effect of this conflation is to eradicate materiality’s inferior or subordinate status to the spiritual. A still disputed implication is the imputation of intelligence to all matter.