David Harmon

There are passages of Conway’s Principles that treat all of creation as one integrated substance, but others that treat creation as constituted by indefinitely many substances. Recent work attempts to assuage the tension between these possibilities by arguing that Conway is a priority monist about creation, while other work has pushed back on this position, holding that Conway is better interpreted as a straightforward pluralist. In defense of the priority monist reading, this paper entertains a radical thesis: that Conway’s Christ is the most fundamental created substance of which all other created substances are proper parts. On this reading, Christ is identical to the whole of creation, despite Conway’s commitment to substantial distinction between Christ and creatures on the basis of their mutability. While creatures are mutable for better and worse, Christ is only mutable toward the good. Since the proposed view identifies Christ with the mereological totality of created beings, it holds that the world is perpetually increasing in goodness, though any of its parts may intermittently deteriorate.

For an object to be multilocated is for it to wholly occupy disjoint spatial regions simultaneously. If multilocation is possible, it is possible that a multilocated particle is wholly located at 1080 distinct locations, such that it constitutes a particle-for-particle duplicate of the actual universe. Such a universe would presumably be perceptually identical to the actual universe. If we take multilocation as possible, we are thus presented with two accounts between which our perceptual evidence cannot adjudicate: one wherein the universe is constituted by many particles and another wherein it is constituted by one radically multilocated particle. Parsimony concerns dictate that the latter is the more rational to accept. Since this is absurd, we should reject that multilocation is possible. Mooney responds to the problem by arguing that distinct location is evidence of non-identity, even if acceptance of the possibility of multilocation entails that this evidence is not decisive. If this is right, then the evidence favors a theory featuring many particles. In this paper, I contend that our commitment to taking distinct location as evidence of nonidentity is motivated by a more fundamental intuition that does not apply in the relevant context.

In the entirety of his corpus, Spinoza uses the phrase ‘simplest bodies’ [corporibus simplicissimis] exactly twice and never offers an explanation of what it means. That said, it appears to play a fundamental role in his thought. This paper evaluates two twentieth-century readings of Spinoza in order to present a new original theory of simplest bodies. Ultimately, I present a reading of Spinoza which accepts a nuanced amalgamation of these accounts. I argue that the right understanding of Spinozistic simplest bodies is something like the following: simplest bodies are portions of extension featuring motive homogeneity among their necessarily infinite parts. For Spinoza, simplest bodies thus feature no mereological simplicity at all, but rather only motive simplicity, in that they are properly characterized by a single ratio of motion and rest.