[1][2][3] Adopting the term from physics, where the search for a theory of everything is ongoing, philosophers have discussed the viability of the concept and analyzed its properties and implications.
The "system building" style of metaphysics attempts to answer all the important questions in a coherent way, providing a complete picture of the world.
Examples from the early modern period include Leibniz's monadology, Descartes's dualism, and Spinoza's monism.
At present, work is underway on the structural-systematic philosophy (SSP), to which the following books are devoted: Lorenz B. Puntel, Structure and Being (2008; translation of Struktur und Sein, 2006) and Being and God (2011; translation of Sein und Gott, 2010) and Alan White, Toward a Philosophical Theory of Everything (2014).
Rescher concludes that any Theorist of Everything committed to comprehensiveness and finality is bound to regard noncircularity as "something that has to be jettisoned".
Rescher's proposal in "The Price of an Ultimate Theory" is to dualize the concept of explanation so that a fact can be explained either derivationally, by the premises which lead to it, or systemically, by the consequences which follow from it.
In "Prolegomena to Any Future Philosophy",[3] a 2002 essay in the Journal of Evolution and Technology, Mark Alan Walker discusses modern responses to the question of how to reconcile "the apparent finitude of humans" with what he calls "the traditional telos of philosophy—the attempt to unite thought and Being, to arrive at absolute knowledge, at a final theory of everything."
He contrasts two ways of closing this "gap between the ambitions of philosophy, and the abilities of human philosophers": a "deflationary" approach in which philosophy is "scaled down into something more human" and the attempt to achieve a theory of everything is abandoned, and an "inflationary", transhumanist approach in which philosophers are "scaled up" by advanced technology into "super-intelligent beings" better able to pursue such a theory.