Monism - Ancient Western Philosophers

Ancient Western Philosophers

The following pre-Socratic philosophers described reality as being monistic:

  • Thales: Water.
  • Anaximander: Apeiron (meaning 'the undefined infinite'). Reality is some, one thing, but we cannot know what.
  • Anaximenes: Air.
  • Heraclitus: Change, symbolized by fire (in that everything is in constant flux).
  • Parmenides: Being. Reality is an unmoving perfect sphere, unchanging, undivided. We say there are things that exist and things that don't exist; Parmenides wrote that nothing doesn't exist, only existence does.

And post-Socrates:

  • Neopythagorians such as Apollonius of Tyana centered their cosmologies on the Monad or One.
  • Stoics, like Spinoza later, taught that there is only one substance, identified as God.
  • Middle Platonism under such works as Numenius express the Universe emanating from the Monad or One.
  • Neoplatonism is Monistic. Plotinus taught that there was an ineffable transcendent god, 'The One,' of which subsequent realities were emanations. From The One emanates the Divine Mind (Nous), the Cosmic Soul (Psyche), and the World (Cosmos).

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