From the beginning of the 21st century, academic field and culture of the humankind have been approaching another great shift. The postmodern trends in philosophy and cultural relativism of the previous century have become things of the past. New, realist philosophies have been explored. These include speculative realism and object-oriented ontology, indicating a rebound from past emphasis on textual interpretation and linguistic theory. Meanwhile, a trend called multinaturalism has been gaining attention in anthropology. In this book, Takashi Shimizu attempts to construct an expanded, monadological philosophy, stimulated to a large extent by the above-mentioned trends. Shimizu is known for his studies on the works of French philosopher Michel Serres, and he has also contributed to original developments on Serres's métaphysique souche-the exploration in metaphysics for a structure equivalent to a stem cell, which precedes the occurrence of various binary oppositions, such as of the subject and the object and of the one and the many.