Priority Monism and Junk

Abstract

AbstractPriority Monism—the position that what is fundamental is one object, the Cosmos—has recently been brought to the fore by Jonathan Schaffer, who has put forward a variety of arguments in its favour. However, Priority Monism has been criticised on the grounds that junk—where for some structure to be junky is for every object in it to be a proper part of another object in the structure—is metaphysically possible. The aim of this paper is to investigate how the monist can deal with this problem. I argue they can successfully argue against junk's possibility, but their response leaves a new problem for monism (the problem of the possibility of weak junk). To address this problem, they need to develop a new version of Priority Monism, on which the Cosmos is identical to all its parts taken collectively. I denote this version of monism as Weak Priority Monism. Contra Schaffer, I think a Priority Monist can and should hold to the thesis that Composition is Identity.