Dyology: On Diversity and Equality — _Volume I: Metaphysics and Philosophy of Religion_

What is the ultimate ground of reality, and could it be a mind? This volume lays the foundation of a two-volume work and carries it through the metaphysics of difference to the God that was supposed to stand at the bottom of everything. It begins from the one claim whose denial defeats itself: at least one difference obtains. Deny it and the denial stands apart from its own negation, from silence, from everything else you might have thought; the denial exhibits what it denies. Chapter 1 states the mechanism, self-vindication, shows that it survives Stroud’s objection to arguments from the conditions of thought, and secures the narrow ontological result on two premises of the same standing. Chapter 2 supplies the premise the mechanism runs through — content requires contrast, so the diff is the unit of meaning — by a dilemma no theory of content escapes, and explains the myth of the given structurally. Chapter 3 proves that every state of reality either contains a distinction or contains none, that the partition of diversity and equality is exhaustive and substantive, and that nothingness and undifferentiated being are two names for one condition according to whether it obtains. Chapters 4 to 7 build the footing. If the chain of grounds ends, it ends at one place where the question “what grounds this?” loses its footing rather than going unanswered: equality, the state with no internal distinctions, which is the unique foreclosing terminus of grounding (Chapter 4). Time can end without ending at a moment, as the open interval approaches a bound it never contains, so the demand for something before the beginning is malformed at the boundary, Kant’s first antinomy no longer compels transcendental idealism, and the two hierarchies converge on one state (Chapter 5). That state can bear no cognitive property, since knowledge, will and awareness each require at least two distinguishable states; the terminus is unintelligent (Chapter 6). And meaning and difference are one closed grid, since every attempt to point beyond contrast is itself a contrast (Chapter 7). On every branch of the argument something has always existed, and the framework owes one brute fact, that differentiation obtains, which it logs openly. Chapters 8 to 12 turn the footing on theology. The mind cannot picture nothing and substitutes an image for it, and “infinite” names two opposite conditions, maximal structure and its absence, which the theological tradition demands of one being at once (Chapter 8). Creation from nothing is incoherent as a transition, while dependence survives as the sustainer (Chapter 9). Ground and mind come apart: the absolutely simple God conjoins what the structure of difference makes incompatible, and the maximally determinate God is an inhabitant of the diversity it was meant to ground (Chapter 10). The kalām argument is granted its cause and denied its necessary being, since the impossibility of undifferentiated being is a modal thesis it has not discharged (Chapter 11). Negative theology finds the limit of thought and misreads it as a being (Chapter 12). Together these establish the theological side of the book’s arch: no mind stands above the hierarchy of difference. Three appendices assemble the answer to why there is something rather than nothing, map the undifferentiated terminus across Plotinus, Parmenides, Advaita and the negative way under its three names, one, zero and infinity, and read analytic philosophy’s characteristic splittings as repairs to a shared grid of meaning. Every result is graded — self-vindicating, established, constructed, proposed — with its defeat condition stated where it is made, and the Premise Register, printed in both volumes, records what each result rests on. The footing and the theological pier are established throughout; the kalām verdict is entered as dialectical, the burden relocated and the thesis unrefuted. This is Volume I of Dyology: On Diversity and E