Monad

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Monad is an English term meaning "one," "single," or "unit," especially in technical contexts. It comes from the Late Latin stem monad-, which comes from the Greek word monos or μονάς (from the word μόνος, which means "one", "single", or "unique"), and may refer to:

• Monad (category theory), a type of functor in category theory.
• Monads in functional programming, type constructors that are used in functional programming languages to capture various notions of sequential computation.
• A monadic function or operator may be the same as a unary one, or one somehow having to do with either of the previous kinds of monad. Monadic predicate calculus is a form of logic based on unary operators.
• Windows PowerShell, a command line interface for Microsoft Windows code-named "Monad".

• Monad (music), a single note, as opposed to a dyad or trichord.

[edit] Philosophy

• Monism, the metaphysical and theological view that all is of one essence, and this essence is sometimes called the monad.
• Monad (Technocracy), the symbol of Technocracy Incorporated and the Technocratic movement.
• Monadology, a book of philosophy by Gottfried Leibniz in which monads are a basic unit of perceptual reality
  • Physical Monadology by Immanuel Kant also dealt with this topic.
• In Hermetica, (a category of popular Late Antique literature purporting to contain secret wisdom) The Cup or Monad is one of the texts making up the Corpus Hermetica.
• In Ancient philosophy the term can refer to:
  • Monad (Epicurus), Epicurus described "monads" that were the smallest units of matter, much like Democritus's notion of an atom.
  • Monad (symbol), For many others, including Pythagoras, Parmenides, Xenophanes, Plato, Aristotle, and Plotinus, Monad was a term for God or the first being, or the totality of all beings. Monad being the source or the One meaning without division.
  • Monad (Gnosticism), the most primal aspect of God in Gnosticism.
• In early biology, the indivisible life essence, either the cell or nucleus.