 It is important to see that the thesis that some things are mereologically fundamental does not entail a commitment to atomism. Here it may be helpful to introduce the distinction between (priority) pluralism and monism. We have already seen that a monist might be attracted to a view about fundamentality where there is just one fundamental entity, such as the cosmos or universe as a whole (Schaffer 2010a is a good exposition and defense of this Spinoza-inspired view; see also Newlands 2010). This view does not directly entail anything about the relative fundamentality relations among the non-fundamental, but it enables us to better understand that the converse of mereological dependence, as Kim defines it, might hold: instead of wholes depending on their parts, the parts could depend on the whole. This contrasts with the more familiar idea, often associated with but not entailed by atomism, that mereological dependence must run from the larger to the smaller, mereological atoms being the fundamental entities. So, the choice concerning the direction of the relevant dependence relation is often reflected by the choice between priority pluralism and monism, although strictly speaking these issues are independent (Miller 2009; Trogdon 2009; Cotnoir 2013; Steinberg 2015; Tallant 2015). Two proponents of  (RI),  even if they agree on which proper subset of metaphysical dependence relations is relevant to fundamentality, may disagree on the direction of the relevant dependence  relation(s).[9]