Philosophy & ThoughtGreek → English
Monism
/ˈmɒnɪzəm/noun
The view that everything that exists is ultimately of one kind or one substance.
The Greek roots
μόνος
mónos
single, alone
Literally: “the doctrine of only-one”
Follow a root:μόνος26 words
The story of the word
Christian Wolff set the word going in Latin in the 1730s, sorting philosophers into monists and dualists by how many kinds of stuff they allowed. The Greek behind it is only μόνος, single. English took it up in the 19th century through German arguments about mind and matter, and Ernst Haeckel then flew it as a banner for a worldview with no separate spirit in it.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → modern Latin → German → English
- First recorded
- 1860s
Same family
monolithmonotonymonopolymonk
In a sentence
Spinoza's monism leaves no room for a mind that stands outside nature looking in.
She argued for a monism of process rather than of stuff.