The successful specification of the definition of art has so far proven elusive. Discouraged by repeated failed attempts at the definition of art, numerous anti-essentialist philosophers have suggested alternative accounts. In this paper I defend the project of the definition of art by arguing that the strongest anti-essentialist arguments are unsuccessful in ruling out either the possibility or the value of a definition of art. Based on my observations regarding a blind spot in Wittgenstein’s anti-essentialist “look and (...) see” approach, I conclude by suggesting a new avenue of investigation for essentialism regarding art. (shrink)

In ordinary language, in the medical sciences, and in the overlap between them, we frequently make claims which imply that we might have had different gametic origins from the ones we actually have. Such statements seem intuitively true and coherent. But they counterfactually ascribe different DNA to their referents and therefore contradict material-origin essentialism, which Kripke and his followers argue is intuitively obvious. In this paper I argue, using examples from ordinary language and from philosophy of medicine and bioethics, (...) that statements which attribute alternative material origins to their referents are useful, common in political and medical reasoning, and in many cases best interpreted literally. So we must replace the doctrine of material-origin essentialism with one that can make sense of ordinary discourse and the language of the medical sciences. I propose an anti-essentialist account of such counterfactuals according to which individuals’ modal properties are relative to a given inquiry. (shrink)

Anti-essentialism holds that no thing has any modal properties except relative to a conceptualization—for instance, relative to a description. One and the same thing might be essentially rational relative to the description “mathematician” but only accidentally rational relative to the description “bicyclist.” Anti-essentialism was dominant in pre-Kripkean days. The old description theory of names made room for anti-essentialism by reducing apparently true de re modal attributions to de dicto ones by way of the hidden (...) description. We can follow Kripke in giving up the description theory without thereby giving up anti-essentialism. Counterpart theory makes room for anti-essentialism by interpreting de re modal attributions by way of counterparts and allowing that different other-worldly objects count as a thing’s counterparts relative to different ways of thinking of the thing. One thing is essentially physical when thought of as a body but only accidentally physical when thought of as a person. One thing has its shape essentially when thought of as a statue but only accidentally when thought of as a lump of clay. The metaphysical meat of counterpart theory is that it allows for anti-essentialism. (shrink)

Kupperman (1995) advances an anti-essentialist view of emotions in which he suggests that there can be emotion without feeling or affect, emotion without corresponding motivation, and emotion without an intentional relation to an object such that the emotion is about that object in some way. In this reply to Kupperman's essay, I suggest a number of problems with his rejection of the essentialist position. I argue that in his discussion of feelings Kupperman is crucially not clear about the distinction (...) between the ascription of emotions by others versus the experience of emotions by an individual. Furthermore, I also question his analysis of the role of linguistic empiricism in philosophy and psychology. With respect to Kupperman's analysis of intentionality, I argue that he confuses the ability to readily identify intentional objects with the issue of their actual existence. Finally, I suggest that Kupperman confuses the concepts of action and motivation in his discussion of motivation. (shrink)

Third wave anti-essentialist critique has too often been used to dismiss second wave feminist projects. I examine claims that Carol Gilligan's work is "essentialist," and argue that her recent research requires this criticism be rethought. Anti-essentialist feminist method should consist in attention to the relations of power that construct accounts of gendered identity in the course of different forms of empirical enquiry, not in rejecting any general claim about women or girls.

In his 'The Disorder of Things' John Dupré presents an objection to reductionism which I call the 'anti-essentialist objection': it is that reductionism requires essentialism, and essentialism is false. I unpack the objection and assess its cogency. Once the objection is clearly in view, it is likely to appeal to those who think conceptual analysis a bankrupt project. I offer on behalf of the reductionist two strategies for responding, one which seeks to rehabilitate conceptual analysis and one (...) (more concessive) which avoids commitment to any such analysis. (shrink)

As the foundational contributions of the fin de si encounters with sexual science dialectically produced an anti-essentialist variant of feminism. This microscopic interpretation of historical context, it will be argued, provides a new vista from which to view the larger tableau of modern European, especially Austrian, intellectual history.

I argue that clarity about essence provides the tools both to isolate a distinct concept of art and to see why anti-essentialism is a plausible, though incomplete, doctrine about it. While this concept is not the only concept currently expressed by our word ‘art’, it is an interesting, and might be an important, one. One of the challenges it poses to conceptual analysis is to explain what it is to be better than being good of a thing's kind, (...) where this extra-goodness is neither a trivial fact nor simply a matter of being a good instance of two different kinds of thing. While anti-essentialism seems to be right about what types of analysis will not work for it, this result only deepens the question of what its proper analysis is. (shrink)

This paper defends a “conceptualist” interpretation of Nāgārjuna which stands in-between two other prominent accounts, the nihilist view and what I call the anti-essentialist view. The nihilist reading, recently defended by Thomas Wood, holds that for Nāgārjuna nothing exists either at the ultimate or at the conventional level. On the anti-essentialist account, supported by Jay Garfield and David Kalupahana, though Nāgārjuna rejects the ultimate existence of things as svabhāva (independent), he affirms their conventional existence as interdependent. I argue (...) that the nihilist view raises two challenges to which anti-essentialists have given no adequate response. The first alleges that the notion that all things are interdependent is incoherent. The second consists of passages from Nāgārjuna’s writings that seem to claim that whatever exists is svabhāva or depends on what is svabhāva. The conceptualist interpretation, I suggest, allows us to respond to these challenges while avoiding the implausible nihilist account. On this view, the passages in question assert a claim not about what exists but about the concept of existence, namely that it is a core part of this concept that what exists is either svabhāva or depends on what is svabhāva. Thus, contra the anti-essentialist, Nāgārjuna’s view is that there is no coherent concept of universal interdependent existence. But contra the nihilist, things can still be said to exist conventionally, since conventional discourse is precisely discourse in which subjects do not endorse the svabhāva component of the concept of existence. The upshot – again contra the anti-essentialist – is that both conventional truth and emptiness are strictly inconceivable. (shrink)

We argue that Indian speakers’ discourse about reincarnation represents a counterexample to the ordinary-language evidence for the Kripkean thesis of material-origin essentialism. Advocates of the essentiality of origins contend not only that persons have the property of coming from the two particular gametes they actually came from essentially, but also that competent ordinary-language speakers find this view intuitively compelling. We adduce evidence from Indian speakers’ discourse, both ordinary-language remarks and published literature about reincarnation, to disconfirm that contention. We argue (...) that the view that persons are mental entities is clearly coherent, intuitive, and not obviously necessarily false. We consider mental essentialism as an alternative, according to which persons are only accidentally embodied or biological. But we argue against it in favour of a modally relative anti-essentialism: what properties count as essential to an object and what properties count as accidental is not fixed but varies according to pragmatic utility. (shrink)

This article revisits the ethical and political questions raised by feminist debates over essentialism, the belief that there are properties essential to women and which all women share. Feminists’ widespread rejection of essentialism has threatened to undermine feminist politics. Re-evaluating two responses to this problem—‘strategic’ essentialism and Iris Marion Young’s idea that women are an internally diverse ‘series’—I argue that both unsatisfactorily retain essentialism as a descriptive claim about the social reality of women’s lives. I argue (...) instead that women have a ‘ genealogy’: women always acquire femininity by appropriating and reworking existing cultural interpretations of femininity, so that all women become situated within a history of overlapping chains of interpretation. Because all women are located within this complex history, they are identifiable as belonging to a determinate social group, despite sharing no common understanding or experience of femininity. The idea that women have a genealogy thus reconciles anti-essentialism with feminist politics. (shrink)

Emotions normally include elements of feeling, motivation, and also intentionality; but the argument of this essay is that there can be emotion without feeling, emotion without corresponding motivation, and emotion without an intentional relation to an object such that the emotion is (among other things) a belief about or construal of it. Many recent writers have claimed that some form of intentionality is essential to emotion, and then have created lines of defence for this thesis. Thus, what look like troublesome (...) cases of emotions can be regarded as having a global intentionality or as being “mood-like”. Alternatively surges of non-intentional joy or ecstasy can be regarded as merely feelings rather than as emotions, and what people experience in response to absolute music can be treated similarly. A clear view of how we normally talk about moods, emotions, and feelings however undermines these defences; and in particular we can understand the role of emotions in relation to absolute music once we become clear about the way in which musical content stands in for intentional objects. (shrink)

In his new book, The Force of Law, Frederick Schauer maintains that law has no necessary properties, and that therefore jurisprudents should not assume that an inquiry into the nature of law has to be a search for such properties. I argue, however, that Schauer's attempt to show that legal anti-essentialism is a defensible position fails, because his one main argument is either irrelevant or else incomplete, depending on how one understands it, and because the other main argument (...) is false. (shrink)

A long-established consensus in the philosophy of biology holds that biological species are not natural kinds with intrinsic essences, despite what Putnam (1975) and Kripke (1980) thought. This anti-essentialist consensus has recently been challenged by Michael Devitt, who insists that it rests on a mistake. According to Devitt, philosophers of biology have failed to recognise the distinction between two quite different questions one can ask about species: the Category question and the Taxon question. The various “species concepts” found in (...) the biological literature are attempts to answer the former but are silent about the latter, Devitt claims, so do not conflict with essentialism, pace what philosophers of biology believe. By carefully attending to the logical relation between the Category and Taxon questions, Devitt’s claim that the anti-essentialist consensus rests on a mistake is shown to be untenable. (shrink)

Proponents of the this-universe objection to fine-tuning arguments for a multiverse claim that while the multiverse hypothesis raises the probability that some universe is fine-tuned for life, it fails to raise the probability that this one is. Because that is so, they further argue, those who take the fine-tuning of this universe as evidence for a multiverse are guilty of a probabilistic fallacy. Some opponents of the this-universe objection contend that it turns on contentious assumptions regarding the essential properties of (...) universes and agents. In particular, it is alleged to turn on the assumption that universes fail to have their nomic properties essentially as well as on the assumption that we could not have existed in other universes. I argue by contrast that the this-universe objection does not depend on these assumptions. (shrink)

Fortunately, the challenge of alienation is now again taken seriously in intellectual discussions. Already years ago, Axel Honneth made the reflection on alienation a defining issue for social philosophy per se, and as the prime example of social philosophy, he brought forth Critical Theory. Within this horizon, recently two conceptions of alienation have been proposedby Rahel Jeaggi and Hartmut Rosa, and the present article takes issue with both of these proposals, criticizing in particular their anti-essentialism. Hence, questioning the (...) post-metaphysical agenda that Jaeggi has inherited from Honneth, I criticize her juxtaposition of the existentialist and the Marxist critique of alienation, her understanding of the good life as autonomy, and finally her acceptance of post-modern and liberal criticism of metaphysics and ontology. Turning to Rosa, I appreciate his societal approach to the critique of alienation, emphasizing the significance of capitalist modernity, but also he accepts the post-metaphysical agenda, and his aesthetic idea of the good life as resonance remains strongly individualistic. Both of these conceptions of alienation thus have ideological implications that threatens to turn upside down the original intentions and implications of Critical Theory in relation to social and political justice. To conclude, the criticism of capitalism, political economy and real life politics is still relevant for understanding alienation, and therefore it is worth returning to the classics of the discussion. (shrink)

When Huxley quotes the famous Jefferson line in Brave New World Revisited—"If a nation expects to be ignorant and free... it expects what never was and never will be"2—there is something, on the face, humorously explicit to it. The state of civilization the brave new world is in seems to speak directly to this point. Brave new worlders are ignorant and conspicuously not free; they "[like] what [they've] got to do"3 because they have been decanted and conditioned by the corporate (...) government, the World State. This cursory assessment, however, obscures another possibility, one that touches on the satirical poignancy and relevance of. (shrink)

Reading Foucault’s work on power and subjectivity alongside “developmentalist” approaches to evolutionary biology, this article endorses poststructuralist critiques of political ideals grounded in the value of subjective agency. Many political theorists embrace such critiques, of course, but those who do are often skeptical of liberal democracy, and even of normative theory itself. By contrast, those who are left to theorize liberal democracy tend to reject or ignore poststructuralist insights, and have continued to employ dubious ontological assumptions regarding human agents. Against (...) both groups, I argue that Foucault’s poststructuralism must be taken seriously, but that it is ultimately consistent with normative theory and liberal democracy. Linking poststructuralist attempts to transcend the dichotomy between agency and structure with recent efforts by evolutionary theorists to dissolve a similarly stubborn opposition between nature and nurture, I develop an anti-essentialist account of human nature and agency that vindicates poststructuralist criticism while enabling a novel defense of liberal democracy. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:World Alienation in Feminist ThoughtThe Sublime Epistemology of Emphatic Anti-EssentialismBonnie Mann (bio)The earth is the very quintessence of the human condition.Hannah ArendtWe are tied to place undetachably and without reprieve.Edward CaseyThe alliance between feminism and postmodernism1 in the American academy has brought about a revolution in feminist epistemology. The early feminist epistemology of unmasking, of sorting through appearances to get to the real underneath, has been discredited as (...) "essentialist."2 Feminist standpoint epistemology was an attempt to respond to this accusation by using social location as a "standpoint" from which at least local and situated knowledge could be articulated.3 More recently, many feminists have taken on the epistemology of the simulacrum. Here "the real" plays a part only as that which dissolves into the appearances themselves. Behind the appearances, if there were such a place, would be only an abyss of absence.With this revolution in feminist epistemology comes a wholesale displacement [End Page 45] of the feminist project. Others have argued that the feminist political project is displaced in the alliance with postmodernism.4 On my view, the epistemological and political displacements accompany and instantiate an even deeper level of dispossession. The ultimate price we pay for the feminist alliance with postmodernism may well be a material displacement, in which we are dispossessed of our ability to inquire into and articulate our relationship to the earth itself. We find this planet we inhabit, this physical place that sustains us moment by moment, to be effectively shut out of what now passes as "good" feminist inquiry.In 1958, Hannah Arendt wrote already of "the advent of a new and yet unknown age," marked by world-alienation, a "twofold flight from the earth into the universe and from the world into the self" (1958, 6). The "unknown age" has now been named. Postmodernity takes this flight one step further than Arendt foresaw, however, and even folds the universe and the self into discourse. World-alienation has taken the form of the self-enclosed universe of the text. Our sojourn in the world of signs is so paradigmatic of "the postmodern condition," that asking the question of our relationship to the physical planet we inhabit seems naive and nostalgic. Anything we might say about the earth, after all, is already in language, already bound up in discourse. To speak of an "earth" or "nature" that exceeds discourse is to find oneself locked, even so, within discourse. Having lost our belief in the referentiality of language, in the relation between words and things, we are stuck with signs that refer only to other signs.A capitulation to our very real physical and phenomenological experience of world-alienation finds here its theoretical form. We give in to placelessness. As Edward S. Casey writes, "To say 'I have no place to go' is to admit to a desperate circumstance. Yet we witness daily the disturbing spectacle of people with no place to go: refugees from natural catastrophes or strife-torn countries, the homeless on the streets of modern cities, not to mention 'stray' animals. In fearing that 'the earth is becoming uninhabitable'—a virtual universal lament—we are fearing that the earth will no longer provide adequate places in which to live. The incessant motion of postmodern life in late-capitalist societies at once echoes and exacerbates this fear" (Casey 1993, xiii). Intellectually, we find ourselves in equally desperate circumstances, trapped as we are inside a language that can refer only to itself. This self-enclosure becomes a kind [End Page 46] of no place, a world-alienated space without place,5 and feminist thinking is set adrift from the physical places that give feminist thinkers our moment by moment sustenance. In its alliance with postmodernism, feminism has capitulated to the placelessness that so marks our phenomenological experience at the turn of the millennium.6Yet we inhabit this planet. Faced with its destruction we are compelled to make sense of our relationship to it and to act to save it. A feminist philosophy that turns its back on the earth embraces, rather than contests, the world-alienation of which Arendt spoke. Yet our alienation... (shrink)

The term “science” is a common noun that is used to designate a whole range of activities. If Reeves is right—and I think he is—that there is no essence to these activities that allows them to be objectively identified and demarcated from nonscience, then what qualifies as science is determined by communities. It becomes much more difficult on this antiessentialism position to identify and dismiss pseudo‐science. I suggest we might find a way forward, though, by engaging a philosophical tradition that (...) has largely been neglected in English‐speaking science and religion studies, and by articulating a theory of consensus along the lines of Oreskes (2019). (shrink)

_Real Essentialism_ presents a comprehensive defence of neo-Aristotelian essentialism. Do objects have essences? Must they be the kinds of things they are in spite of the changes they undergo? Can we know what things are really like – can we define and classify reality? Many, if not most, philosophers doubt this, influenced by centuries of empiricism, and by the anti-essentialism of Wittgenstein, Quine, Popper, and other thinkers. _Real Essentialism_ reinvigorates the tradition of realist, essentialist metaphysics, defending the (...) reality and knowability of essence, the possibility of objective, immutable definition, and its relevance to contemporary scientific and metaphysical issues such as whether essence transcends physics and chemistry, the essence of life, the nature of biological species, and the nature of the person. (shrink)

Ameliorative projects design and propagate new linguistic content for some expressions we use for political or social justice purposes. These projects are often driven by an anti-essentialist agenda: they aim to debunk the idea that social categories such as “woman,” “man,” or “race” are constituted by natural essences. But critics argue that nouns tend to trigger essentialist thinking. And because ameliorative projects typically retain nouns, it is argued that these projects cannot achieve their anti-essentialist goals. In response, I (...) argue that the psychological effects of noun use tend to support, rather than hinder, the anti-essentialist goals of ameliorators. (shrink)

Quine, in an influential passage, characterizes a certain kind of metaphysical view as "Aristotelian essentialism." Recent work on Aristotle suggests that he may not have been an essentialist in Quine's sense. This paper examines the question whether, and to what extent, Aristotle is committed to the kind of essentialism Quine discusses. Various promising areas of Aristotle's thought (alteration vs. coming-to-be and passing-away, kath' hauto predication) are examined and found wanting as sources of essentialism. Instead, Aristotle is found (...) to be committed to essentialism in the hylomorphic conception of substance featured in the late books of the Metaphysics, despite the superficially anti-essentialistic appearance of the conception of matter as the ultimate subject of predication. Essentialism is part and parcel of Aristotle's conception of substances as the basic individuals. (shrink)

Essentialism in philosophy is the position that things, especially kinds of things, have essences, or sets of properties, that all members of the kind must have, and the combination of which only members of the kind do, in fact, have. It is usually thought to derive from classical Greek philosophy and in particular from Aristotle’s notion of “what it is to be” something. In biology, it has been claimed that pre-evolutionary views of living kinds, or as they are sometimes (...) called, “natu-ral kinds”, are essentialist. This static view of living things presumes that no tran-sition is possible in time or form between kinds, and that variation is regarded as accidental or inessential noise rather than important information about taxa. In contrast it is held that Darwinian, and post-Darwinian, biology relies upon varia-tion as important and inevitable properties of taxa, and that taxa are not, therefore, kinds but historical individuals. Recent attempts have been made to undercut this account, and to reinstitute essentialism in biological kind terms. Others argue that essentialism has not ever been a historical reality in biology and its predecessors. In this chapter, I shall outline the many meanings of the notion of essentialism in psychology and social science as well as science, and discuss pro- and anti-essentialist views, and some recent historical revisionism. It turns out that nobody was essentialist to speak of in the sense that is antievolutionary in biology, and that much confusion rests on treating the one word, “essence” as meaning a single notion when in fact there are many. I shall also discuss the philosophical implica-tions of essentialism, and what that means one way or the other for evolutionary biology. Teaching about evolution relies upon narratives of change in the ways the living world is conceived by biologists. This is a core narrative issue. (shrink)

Talk of “essences” has, since Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, gained significant currency in contemporary philosophy. It is no longer unfashionable to talk about the essence of this or that (natural) kind, and as such we now find a variety of brands of essentialism on the market including B.D. Ellis’s scientific essentialism, David Oderberg’s real Essentialism, Alexander Bird’s dispositional essentialism, and the contemporary essentialism of Kripke and Putnam. -/- Almost all these brands of essentialism (...) share a particular gloss on Locke’s famous objection to Aristotle that natural kinds are demarcated by nominal essences not real essences. Thus Oderberg claims that ‘Empiricists take [real] essences to be paradigmatically unobservable’ and that this ‘objection goes back at least to John Locke’ (Oderberg 2007: 21). Bird, presenting his dispositional essentialism, defines a notion of “being” as ‘the reverse of Locke’s definition of essence’ which he takes to be ‘the being of any thing, whereby it is what it is’ (Bird 2007: 100). Joseph LaPorte, discussing nominal and real essences, claims that ‘Kripke and Putnam seem to affirm something more substantive: that biological kinds have “real essences” in Locke’s terminology’ (LaPorte 2004: 49). Even avowed anti-essentialists such as John Dupré sanction the standard criticism of Locke that his scepticism about the knowability of real essences was ‘premature’, and claim that ‘genuine natural kinds provide the extensions of many terms of natural language, where these natural kinds are determined by true Lockean real essences’ (Dupré 1993: 22). -/- All of these essentialisms (even Dupré’s anti-essentialism) are wrong about Locke. Oderberg is wrong to claim that Locke thought that real essences were paradigmatically unobservable; Bird is wrong to think that Locke’s notion of essence is the being of anything whereby it is what it is; LaPorte is wrong to think that Kripke and Putnam are talking about Lockean real essences (although so are Kripke and Putnam); and Dupré is wrong to think that genuine natural kinds (if by genuine he means objective or mind-independent) are determined but true Lockean real essences . -/- The mistake stems from a standard, but ultimately incorrect, interpretation of Locke’s discussion of essences in An Essay Concerning Human Understanding . This mistaken interpretation (Lowe 1995, 2006, Von Leyden 1973, Wiggins 1974) takes Locke to mean, by “real essence”, the Aristotelian notion i.e. ‘the very being of anything, whereby it is what it is’ (Essay III.iii.15), and interprets his objection as epistemological: we cannot come to know what real essences are, and therefore they cannot figure in our classifications of things into kinds. -/- This paper will present and defend the following two claims: i) that Locke’s notion of “real essence” is not the Aristotelian notion, and ii) that Locke’s objection to the Aristotelian notion was not merely epistemological. The first claim can be defended by presenting and applying Vienne’s (1993) terminological revision. Vienne argues that Locke did not introduce a dichotomy between real and nominal essence, but a trichotomy between real essence, nominal essence and real constitution. This terminological revision will be employed to highlight where ambiguous uses of the phrase “real essence” have caused some serious misunderstandings of Locke’s philosophy. The second claim (steering Locke around what is the classic objection to his thesis) can be defended by presenting a novel way of splitting up Locke’s objections to the Aristotelian notion of essence. The analysis will show that Locke’s anti-essentialism is still in good shape, and of contemporary significance. (shrink)

Dispositional Essentialism is a unified anti-Humean account of the metaphysics of low-level physical properties and laws of nature. In this paper, I articulate the view that I label Canonical Dispositional Essentialism, which comprises a structuralist metaphysics of properties and an account of laws as relations in the property structure. I then present an alternative anti-Humean account of properties and laws. This account rejects CDE’s structuralist metaphysics of properties in favour of a view of properties as qualitative (...) grounds of dispositions and it rejects CDE’s view of laws as relations in favour of a view of laws as features of an efficient description of possible property distributions. I then defend this view over CDE on the grounds that it can overcome an explanatory shortcoming of CDE and that it achieves a level of continuity with science that CDE fails to achieve. The upshot of this paper is a significant narrowing of the range of possibilities in which the absolutely best unified account of laws and properties resides. (shrink)

In our paper we investigate a difficulty arising when one tries to reconsiliateessentialis t’s thinking with classification practice in the biological sciences. The article outlinessome varieties of essentialism with particular attention to the version defended by Brian Ellis. Weunderline the basic difference: Ellis thinks that essentialism is not a viable position in biology dueto its incompatibility with biological typology and other essentialists think that these two elementscan be reconciled. However, both parties have in common metaphysical starting point and (...) theylack explicit track of methodological procedures. Methodological inquiry involves less demandingassumptions than metaphysical, and therefore it is justified to analyse abovementioned discrepancy between Ellis and other essentialist in this context. We do it by bottom-up investigation whichfocuses on the practice of taxonomists in the particular field of biology. A case study helps us todiscover four characteristics of biological typology practice: impossibility of algorithmization,relativity, subjectivity and conventionality. These features prove non-realistic and therefore anti-essentialistic character of biological classification. We conclude by saying that any essentialismrelated to the notion of biological kind cannot be regarded as justified by scientific enterprise of creating typologies. (shrink)

According to Aristotelian essentialism, the nature of an organism is constituted of a particular goal-directed disposition to produce an organism typical of its kind. This paper argues—against the prevailing orthodoxy—that essentialism of this sort is indispensable to evolutionary biology. The most powerful anti-essentialist arguments purport to show that the natures of organisms play no explanatory role in modern synthesis biology. I argue that recent evolutionary developmental biology provides compelling evidence to the contrary. Developmental biology shows that one (...) must appeal to the capacities of organisms to explain what makes adaptive evolution adaptive. Moreover, the specific capacities in question are precisely those that, according to Aristotle, constitute the nature of an organism. Essentialism 1.1 Aristotelian biological kinds Evolutionary anti-essentialism 2.1 Taxonomic anti-essentialism 2.2 Explanatory anti-essentialism Adaptation 3.1 Stability 3.2 Mutability 3.3 Phenotypic plasticity and adaptive evolution The natures of organisms Conclusion. (shrink)

This paper defendsintensional essentialism: a property (intensional entity) is not essential relative to an individual (extensional entity), but relative to other properties (or intensional entities). Consequently, an individual can have a property only accidentally, but in virtue of having that property the individual has of necessity other properties. Intensional essentialism is opposed to various aspects of the Kripkean notion of metaphysical modality, eg, varying domains, existence as a property of individuals, and its category of properties which are both (...) empirical and essential with respect to particular individuals and natural kinds. The key notion of intensional essentialism isrequisite. A requisite is explicated as a relation-in-extension between two intensions (functions from possible worlds and moments of time)X, Y such that wherever and wheneverX is instantiatedY is also instantiated. We predict three readings of the sentence. Every wooden table is necessarily wooden , one involving modalityde re and the other two modalityde dicto. The first reading claims that no individual which is a wooden table is necessarily wooden. The claim is backed up by bare particular anti-essentialism. The two other interpretations claim that it is necessary that whatever is a wooden table is wooden. However, as we try to show, one is logically far more perspicuous thanks to the concept of requisite and thus preferable to more standardde dicto formalizations. (shrink)

David Lewis advised essentialists to judge his counterpart theory a false friend. He also argued that counterpart theory needs natural properties. This essay argues that natural properties are all essentialists need to find a true friend in counterpart theory. Section one explains why Lewis takes counterpart theory to be anti-essentialist and why he thinks it needs natural properties. Section two establishes the connection between the natural properties counterpart theory needs and the essentialist consequences Lewis disavows. Section three answers two (...) objections: the first attempts to block the consequences of adding natural properties to counterpart theory; the second grants the consequences, but denies that they amount to essentialism. –Correspondence to: [email protected]. (shrink)

While I agree in principle both with Banja's (2011) moral relativist claim that there are no absolute moral categories and with his anti-essentialist position (Hauskeller 2009b), it seems to me tha...

Scientific essentialism holds that: (1) each scientific kind is associated with the same set of properties in every possible world; and (2) every individual member of a scientific kind belongs to that kind in every possible world in which it exists. Recently, Ellis (Scientific essentialism, 2001 ; The philosophy of nature 2002 ) has provided the most sustained defense of scientific essentialism, though he does not clearly distinguish these two claims. In this paper, I argue that both (...) claims face a number of formidable difficulties. The necessities of scientific essentialism are not adequately distinguished from semantic necessities, they have not been shown to be necessities in the strictest sense, they must be relativized to context, and they must either be confined to a subset of scientific properties without warrant or their connection to causal powers must be revoked. Moreover, upon closer examination (1) turns out to be a trivial thesis that can be satisfied by non-kinds, and (2) is inapplicable to some of the most fundamental kinds in the basic sciences. (shrink)