How to Be an Eleatic Monist

For convenience, I will use the label ‘Eleatic monism’ to refer to the conjunction of a–d. Eleatic monism flies in the face of common sense. Scholars of pre Socratic thought rarely have anything to say in its defense beyond what the Eleatic philosophers said themselves, and virtually no one treats it as a serious option in metaphysics today. Jonathan Barnes declares that a by itself (never mind the remaining doctrines) is “at best absurd and at worst unintelligible.” (1979a, p. 2) It is not hard to see why. How could anyone possibly look at a sandy beach, witness the birth of a child or the death of a loved one, or gaze into the far reaches of space and believe that there exists exactly one thing that is neither generated nor destroyed, unchanging, and undivided? The problem is not just that Eleatic monism seems to be false. Rather, the problem is that it seems to be so incredibly wide of the mark, so vastly out of touch with the truth, that it is hard to see what sorts of considerations could have led someone even to take it seriously, much less embrace it. What I offer in this paper is a way into the monist’s frame of mind—a model, if you will, for understanding this otherwise apparently unintelligible world view. I will not argue that we should find Eleatic monism plausible; but I will show that, contrary to what many of us might initially have expected, the doctrine does have a legitimate place on the landscape of contemporary metaphysics. I will argue that the doctrines of Eleatic monism ought to be accepted by anyone who accepts the following four theses: PHIL 15-7