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Michael Price, One: Being an Investigation into the Unity of Reality and of its Parts, including the Singular Object which is Nothingness, by Graham Priest, Mind, Volume 126, Issue 501, January 2017, Pages 269–272, https://doi.org/10.1093/mind/fzw043
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How is it that a multiplicity of distinct objects can co-operate to form one object? What accounts for the unity of a complex object, for its being a single thing and no mere disparate plurality of its various parts? In this bracingly original treatise, Graham Priest sets out to answer these questions and others intimately connected with what it is to be metaphysically one.
Reflection on these questions, Priest argues, discloses an aporia: it appears that whatever accounts for a complex object’s unity – that object’s gluon, in Priest’s nomenclature – must itself be, and yet cannot be, an object. (This paradox featured briefly in Priest’s earlier Beyond the Limits of Thought (Oxford: OUP, 2002, p. 193), where the term ‘gluon’ was adopted with apologies to particle physics.) Deploying the view for which he is best known, dialetheism, Priest advances an explanation of metaphysical unity which embraces each of these contradictory appearances as veridical: the gluon of a complex unity both is and is not an object. Priest proceeds to argue that his dialetheic explanation of unity – gluon theory, as he dubs it – has fruitful applications for a wide range of problems in metaphysics, philosophy of language, the history of both Western and Eastern philosophy, and even ethics.
