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1. Galen Strawson has explored the idea underlying the Both View atconsiderable depth, though he has presented it as a version of (real)physicalism and panpsychism rather than as a form of neutral monism(see Strawson 1994: 46–7, 55–9, 72–5; Strawson 2006:187–8, 238ff; Strawson 2016.).

2. In his 1948, Russell further analyzes events into bundles of(concrete) universals. For more on Russell’s view, see Maclean2014.

3. Note that views according to which all neutral entities are events,substances, properties, and/or some other category, are compatiblewith the existence of multiple kinds within such categories (so longas they are neutral in character).

4. More rarely, the German philosopher and psychophysicist GustavFechner (1801–87) has been described as an early pioneer ofneutral monism (Clarke 2004, Textor 2021b). However, Fechner isgenerally deemed a panpsychist or dual-aspect theorist.

5. See Pincock 2018 and Wishon 2021. Note that Ward seemingly used theterm “neutral monism” to refer to Spinozistic dual-aspecttheories.

6. Russell’s treatment of images in his early neutral monist works(1919, 1921) has led a number of commentators to classify Russell as adualist of sorts. Russell himself acknowledges that “we seem tofind a certain dualism, perhaps not ultimate…as to the causallaws” (Russell 1921: 137) that govern sensations and imagesrespectively. The great difficulty of finding a coherentinterpretation of these texts is due, in part, to Russell’sreliance on two different criteria of neutrality: the Neither View andthe Law View. It is doubtful that one can have it both ways. But notethat Russell never suggests that images are mental, in the sense ofbeing directed at an object.

7. Note the epistemic risk incurred by admitting inferred entities intothe realm of the known. As this risk increases, the epistemic yield offollowing the method of logical construction diminishes. It is worthnoting that Russell never intended his logical constructions to secureknowledge against traditional skepticism.

8. The reasons for the first inferential step are stated in (Russell1927a: 278–282). For an extended presentation of the inferencesinvolved in the last two steps, see (Russell 1927a: ch. 20). ForRussell’s final thoughts about what we must assume about theworld in order to infer the existence of events other than our ownsensations, images, and percepts, see (Russell 1948: Part VI).

9. Russell’s views on the epistemic accessibility of oursensations are difficult to pin down exactly. Sensations are the“theoretical core” (Russell 1921: 132) or our percepts. Assuch they remain “more or less hypothetical” (Russell1927b: 212). Some of his examples suggests that we can attend to them;others suggest that we cannot isolate them from other components ofour percepts.

10. While Russell insists that our knowledge of the qualities of ourmental episodes is “the most immediate knowledge of which wehave experience”, he does not accept the so-called RevelationThesis which is routinely attributed to him (Johnston 1992). Accordingto this thesis, we can fully grasp the intrinsic nature of our mentalepisodes and/or their aspects on the basis of careful introspectiveattention. In point of fact, Russell repeatedly emphasizes thatintrospection is limited, “exceedingly fallible and quitepeculiarly liable to falsification in accordance with preconceivedtheory” (Russell 1921: 223-4). Even so, he sees“self-observation as the most reliable way of obtainingknowledge” (Russell 1927b: 129).

11. Russell’s recurring remarks that physics is purely abstractprompted Max Newman’s well-known objection that such knowledgewould render physics either false or trivial—as it would at mostonly capture the cardinality of the physical world. To this, Russellreplied in his autobiography: “I had always assumedspatio-temporal continuity with the world of percepts, that is to say,I had assumed that there might be co-punctuality between percepts andnon-percepts, and even that one could pass by a finite number of steps(from one event to another compresent with it) from one end of theuniverse to the other. And co-punctuality I regarded as a relationwhich might exist among percepts and is itself perceptible”(1968: 259). For more on this debate, see Landini 2017.

12. Russell’s two theses that all fundamental entities are eventsand that all fundamental entities are neutral entities are distinct,but they combine naturally in Russell’s neutral monism.

13. Russell counts Dewey among the American neutral monists in hisAnOutline of Philosophy (1927b: 303). More recently, Richard Galehas also argued forcefully that “Dewey developed a version ofJames’s neutral monism” (2010: 56). PeterGodfrey-Smith—himself somewhat sympathetic to neutral monism(see his “3:AM Interview”)—has similarly suggestedthat Dewey might best be thought of as a neutral monist (2014: 5-6).However, Gale’s discussions of this thesis also makes it quiteclear that this interpretation is quite controversial (1997, 2002,2010).

14. David Chalmers’s paper “Panpsychism andPanprotopsychism” (Chalmers 2015) provides an illuminatingaccount of the dialectic that drives some contemporary philosophers toexplore the little known neutral monistic territory.

15. In this way, neutral monism can solve the traditional dualist problemof perception by maintaining that “we cannot say that‘matter is the cause of our sensations” (1927b: 290). Machagrees: “Bodies do not produce sensations” (Mach 1886:29). To suggest otherwise is to rely on “the monstrous idea ofemploying atoms to explain psychical processes” (Mach 1886:311). Matter/bodies are, after all, nothing but systems of neutralentities, i.e., of Russellian events or Machian elements. And, for allwe know, the events/elements causing a sensation may be quite similarto the sensation it causes. This closes the apparent chasm between the“material process” and the ensuing experience, and themystery of perception vanishes.

16. None of the other neutral monists took the suggestion thatsensations/percepts might occur in the brain seriously. James mentionsthe possibility in a footnote, only to dismiss it as “notseriously defensible” (James 1904a: 79). Mach warns against the“absurdity that can be committed by thinking sensationsspatially into the brain” (Mach 1886: 27). Petzoldt railsagainst the “barbaric quid pro quo that lets the psychologicalsensation get into the brain together with the physiologicalstimulation” (Petzoldt 1906: 170). And a good deal ofAvenarius’s thought is directed against the fallacy of“introjection”—the fallacy of locating thought(broadly conceived) in the brain.

17. As noted in 2.3.1 above, Russell does not strictly eliminate orreduce logically constructed entities. Rather, it simply frees ourrelevant bodies of knowledge from any commitment to the existence ofsuch inferred entities.

18. Note that such physicalist interpretations are not a problem forthose who accept theBoth View of neutrality. This is whyStrawson, for instance, is able to say that the neutral monisms ofJames and Russell are forms of (real) materialism and panpsychism atthe same time—as long as we are careful to distinguish theirnarrow notions of being ‘mental’ from broader ones(Strawson 2020: 324; though see Wishon 2020 for a different reading ofRussell).

19. One of Russell’s early criticisms of neutral monism was basedon a similar idea:

I cannot think that the difference between my seeing the patch of red,and the patch of red being there unseen, consists in the presence orabsence of relations between the patch of red and other objects of thesame kind…. (1914b: 148)

But as his doubts about the existence of the self and of theacquaintance relation grew, what had seemed unthinkable gradually cameto seem plausible.

20. This raises the question of whether Landini should deem Russell anemergentist property-dualist rather than a physicalist.

21. One might reasonably take information in Sayre’s sense to be afeature of ordinary concrete reality. But it is unclearwhether or not such information isitself concrete, which atleast raises questions about the relation between information andconcrete reality. Our thanks to an anonymous referee for raising thischallenge.

22. For the record, Heil does not defend this identity claim as stated inthe example. He defends the weaker claim that every token occurrenceof pain can be described in a physical vocabulary.

23. Given the fact that Nagel allows that the neutral properties mightgive rise to mental or protomental properties, the view ends up beingeven more complex than presented here.

24. This is a version of the thesis of structuralism about physics.Russell is a prominent defender of this view, hence the name“Russellian monism.” His remark that “the aim ofphysics, consciously or unconsciously, has always been to discoverwhat we may call the causal skeleton of the world” (1927a: 391;cf. Russell 1931: 132–3) vividly captures the structuralistidea. The best source for recent work on Russellian monism is Alterand Nagasawa 2015.

25. Here we see C.B. Martin’s “surprising identity”between dispositionality and qualitativity (Martin 2008: 64) beingused to further the case of neutral monism. Although John Heil (see5.2) is a leading advocate of this idea, his case for neutral monismdoes not turn on it.

26. Other contemporaries exploring new directions for neutral monisminclude Michael Silberstein (Silberstein 2020; Silberstein and Chemero2015), Jonathan Westphal (2016), Iva Apostolova (Apostolova 2004,2022; Apostolova and Frederick-Wagner 2020), and Andrea Pace Giannotta(2018, 2021), among others.