Neutral monism

In the philosophy of mind, neutral monism is the view that the mental and the physical are two ways of organizing or describing the same elements, which are themselves "neutral", that is, neither physical nor mental. This view denies that the mental and the physical are two fundamentally different things. Rather, neutral monism claims the universe consists of only one kind of stuff, in the form of neutral elements that are in themselves neither mental nor physical.

Neutral monism about the mind–body relationship is described by C. D. Broad in one of his earlier works, The Mind and Its Place in Nature. Broad's list of possible views about the mind-body problem, which became known simply as "Broad's famous list of 1925" (see chapter XIV of'), states the basis of what this theory had been and was to become. There are few self-proclaimed neutral monists; most of the philosophers who are seen to have this view were classified after their deaths. Some examples of this are Baruch Spinoza, David Hume, Ernst Mach, Richard Avenarius, Kenneth Sayre and Joseph Petzoldt and Jonathan Westphal.

Earlier, William James had propounded the notion in his essay "Does Consciousness Exist?" in 1904 (reprinted in Essays in Radical Empiricism in 1912).Whately Carington in his book Matter, Mind, and Meaning (1949) advocated a form of neutral monism. He held that mind and matter both consist of the same kind of components known as "cognita" or sense data.

According to Stephen Stich and Ted Warfield, neutral monism has not been a popular view in philosophy as it is difficult to develop or understand the nature of the neutral elements.

In 1921, Bertrand Russell adopted a similar position to that of William James. Russell quotes from James's essay "Does 'consciousness' exist?" as follows:

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