Dr Lea Cantor | University of Cambridge

She recently completed her DPhil in Philosophy at the University of Oxford (2023), which was awarded the Oxford Nicolas Berggruen Prize for Best Doctoral Dissertation in Philosophy, Law & Politics (2024). Her primary research interests are in classical Chinese philosophy (especially Daoism), ancient Greek philosophy (especially early Greek philosophy and Hellenistic scepticism), and the global history and historiography of philosophy. 
​

Title | 'Uttering the One: A Platonic and Zhuangzian argument against monism'

Abstract:

Despite occurring in one of the most heavily discussed chapters of the Zhuāngzǐ, chapter 2, Zhuāngzǐ’s argument against monism, centring on the problem of speaking about the One, has so far received limited attention. A.C. Graham once observed in passing that the argument is similar to Plato’s names argument against Parmenidean monism in the Sophist, though the nature and extent of the connection has yet to be elaborated in scholarship.

I thus propose to draw on the literature addressing Plato’s names argument to begin clarifying the mechanisms of the Zhuangzian argument. I show that Plato’s argument specifically targets numericalmonism—that is, the view that there is only one (partless) thing—and that, prima facie, Zhuāngzǐ’s argument, which I call the words argument, similarly targets this view.

Upon closer scrutiny, however, it turns out that both the structure of Zhuāngzǐ’s argument and the nature of its target are more sophisticated and complex than the comparison with Plato suggests. Specifically, I argue that Zhuāngzǐ’s dialectical opponent Huìzǐ espouses a far less outlandish kind of monism than that ascribed to Parmenides by Plato, since, crucially, Huìzǐ’s One admits of parts.

Huìzǐ’s more generous monism bears resemblance to modern priority monism not only in this respect, but also in that it posits a unique ‘maximal’ entity, the whole, where the whole is taken to be more basic than its parts. The particular interest of Zhuāngzǐ’s words argument, I argue, is that it successfully challenges Huizian generous monism, a kind of proto-priority monism.