of monads, followed by instances of monads from the philosophical and
linguistics literature.
-> <small>After you've read this once and are coming back to re-read it to try to digest the details further, the "endofunctors" that slogan is talking about are the boxing operations. Their "monoidal" character is captured in the Monad Laws, where a "monoid"---don't confuse with a mon*ad*---is a simpler algebraic notion, meaning a universe with some associative operation that has an identity. For advanced study, here are some further links on the relation between monads as we're working with them and monads as they appear in category theory:
+> <small>After you've read this once and are coming back to re-read it to try to digest the details further, the "endofunctors" that slogan is talking about are a combination of our boxes and their associated maps. Their "monoidal" character is captured in the Monad Laws, where a "monoid"---don't confuse with a mon*ad*---is a simpler algebraic notion, meaning a universe with some associative operation that has an identity. For advanced study, here are some further links on the relation between monads as we're working with them and monads as they appear in category theory:
[1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outline_of_category_theory)
[2](http://lambda1.jimpryor.net/advanced_topics/monads_in_category_theory/)
[3](http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Haskell/Category_theory)