Priest, Graham, One: Being an Investigation into the Unity of Reality and Its Parts, Including the Singular Object which Is Nothingness New York: Oxford University Press, 2014, xxviii + 252 pages Bryan W. Van Norden 1 Published online: 5 April 2016 # Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2016 Graham Priest has written an original, wide-ranging, and fascinating book on the age- old problem of unity and diversity. Though often technical, this book deals with issues in metaphysics and ethics that are closely connected with Mahayana Buddhism. Priest is very aware of these connections, and is part of a research project that is exploring the links between Buddhist philosophy and non-traditional logic. (See Yasuo Deguchi, Jay L. Garfield, and Graham Priest, “The Way of the Dialetheist: Contradictions in Buddhism,” Philosophy East and West 58.3 [July 2008]: 395–402, and also the special issue of Philosophy East and West 63.3 [July 2013] devoted to discussion of their work.) The present book consists of three distinct parts (which nonetheless form a unity). Part I addresses the issue of what distinguishes a mere collection of items from one thing with parts. Part II discusses how one property can be located in many things. Part III explores the sense in which the many things of the universe are also one. I shall say a bit about Part I, but most of my comments will focus on Part III. What distinguishes a building from just a collection of bricks (and other parts)? There has to be some distinction, or else a pile of bricks at a quarry would be the same as the actual building. The intuitive answer, which goes back at least as far as Aristotle, is that the building is a unity composed of the bricks (matter) organized in a particular structure (form). However, answers like this are vulnerable to “the Bradley Regress.” If the form is what joins the bricks into a unity, what is it that joins the form and the bricks into a unity? Whatever answer one gives, one can ask of that further thing, what joins it to the form and the bricks to form a unity—and so on, indefinitely. Aristotle’ s solution was that forms are a different category of thing from the matter that they unify, so questions that are appropriate to ask of objects (like bricks and buildings) are not appropriate to ask of forms. This answer seems unsatisfactory, though, because we do Dao (2016) 15:307–310 DOI 10.1007/s11712-016-9497-7 * Bryan W. Van Norden brvannorden@vassar.edu 1 Department of Philosophy, Vassar College, Poughkeepsie, NY 12604, USA