modal dualism

21 Mar 2025 - 21 Mar 2025

A term I heard JFM use, in contrast with substance dualism, which is the kind I've been taught to despise my entire life. Not despise exactly – but somehow it is the root of all of western wrongthink. Anyway, modal dualism, if I understand it correctly, does not have the problems of substance dualism. There is one "substance", but it has many ways of being. That seems perfectly sensible.

There's no particular reason to stop at dualism (2) is there? So "modal pluralism" would be the better term. Isn't this exactly the topic of Latours late work which I really should read, on Modes of Existence?

Varieties of Modality (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) seems to be about something else – "modality" as in language modes such as conditionals. That's not at all the same thing.

Ah this is more like it Spinoza’s Modal Metaphysics (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy) Spinoza