| Sumario: | Priority Monism (hereafter, 'Monism'), as defined by Jonathan Schaffer (Philos Rev 119:131-176, ), has a number of components. It is the view that: the cosmos exists; the cosmos is a maximal actual concrete object, of which all actual concrete objects are parts; the cosmos is basic-there is no object upon which the cosmos depends, ontologically; ontological dependence is a primitive and unanalysable relation. In a recent attack, Lowe (Spinoza on monism. Palgave Macmillan, London, pp 92-122, ) has offered a series of arguments to show that Monism fails. He offers up four tranches of argument, with different focuses. These focal points are: (1) being a concrete object; (2) aggregation and dependence; (3) analyses of ontological dependence; (4) Schaffer's no-overlap principle. These are all technical notions, but each figures at the heart of a cluster of arguments that Lowe puts forward. To respond, I work through each tranche of argument in turn. Before that, in the first section, I offer a cursory statement of Monism, as Schaffer presents it in his 2010 paper, Monism: The Priority of the Whole. I then respond to each of Lowe's criticisms in turn, deploying material from Schaffer's 2009 paper Spacetime: the One Substance, as well as various pieces of conceptual machinery from Lowe's own works (The possibility of metaphysics. Clarendon, Oxford, , ) to deflect Lowe's (Spinoza on monism. Palgave Macmillan, London, pp 92-122, ) attacks. In the process of defending Monism from Lowe (Spinoza on monism. Palgave Macmillan, London, pp 92-122, ), I end up offering some subtle refinements to Schaffer's (Philos Rev 119:131-176, ) view and explain how the resulting 'hybrid' view fares in the wider dialectic.
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