Results for 'Biologic Essentialism'

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  1. Biological Essentialism, Projectable Human Kinds, and Psychiatric Classification.Jonathan Y. Tsou - 2022 - Philosophy of Science 89 (5):1155-1165.
    A minimal essentialism (‘intrinsic biological essentialism’) about natural kinds is required to explain the projectability of human science terms. Human classifications that yield robust and ampliative projectable inferences refer to biological kinds. I articulate this argument with reference to an intrinsic essentialist account of HPC kinds. This account implies that human sciences (e.g., medicine, psychiatry) that aim to formulate predictive kind categories should classify biological kinds. Issues concerning psychiatric classification and pluralism are examined.
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    Biological Essentialism.Michael Devitt - 2023 - Oxford, GB: Oxford University Press.
    The book addresses three main issues. The first concerns the essences (natures, identities) of biological taxa, particularly species. Kripke and other metaphysicians hold that these essences are (at least partly) intrinsic, underlying, probably largely genetic properties. This view, based largely on intuitions, is dismissed by the consensus in the philosophy of biology as being incompatible with Darwinism and reflecting ignorance of biology. The book argues that the demands of biological explanation show that the metaphysicians are right. The positive view of (...)
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  3.  20
    Devitt’s ‘Intrinsic Biological Essentialism’.Zdenka Brzović - 2018 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 18 (2):307-318.
    This article is about the problem of essentialism of natural and biological kinds, especially species. We will primarily focus on Michael Devitt’s work “Resurrecting Biological Essentialism” (2008). We will try to prove what a good candidate for the essence of the species could be. This article puts the problem of essentialism into the context of biology and, through the usage of examples, attempts to answer that problem. We are going to try to define essentialism and determine (...)
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  4. Resurrecting biological essentialism.Michael Devitt - 2008 - Philosophy of Science 75 (3):344-382.
    The article defends the doctrine that Linnaean taxa, including species, have essences that are, at least partly, underlying intrinsic, mostly genetic, properties. The consensus among philosophers of biology is that such essentialism is deeply wrong, indeed incompatible with Darwinism. I argue that biological generalizations about the morphology, physiology, and behavior of species require structural explanations that must advert to these essential properties. The objection that, according to current “species concepts,” species are relational is rejected. These concepts are primarily concerned (...)
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  5.  21
    Devitt’s ‘Intrinsic Biological Essentialism’.Urška Martinc - 2018 - Croatian Journal of Philosophy 18 (2):307-318.
    This article is about the problem of essentialism of natural and biological kinds, especially species. We will primarily focus on Michael Devitt’s work “Resurrecting Biological Essentialism” (2008). We will try to prove what a good candidate for the essence of the species could be. This article puts the problem of essentialism into the context of biology and, through the usage of examples, attempts to answer that problem. We are going to try to define essentialism and determine (...)
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  6.  87
    Historical biological essentialism.Michael Devitt - 2018 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 71:1-7.
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  7. Biological essentialism and the tidal change of natural kinds.John S. Wilkins - 2013 - Science & Education 22 (2):221-240.
    The vision of natural kinds that is most common in the modern philosophy of biology, particularly with respect to the question whether species and other taxa are natural kinds, is based on a revision of the notion by Mill in A System of Logic. However, there was another conception that Whewell had previously captured well, which taxonomists have always employed, of kinds as being types that need not have necessary and sufficient characters and properties, or essences. These competing views employ (...)
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  8. Defending Intrinsic Biological Essentialism.Michael Devitt - 2021 - Philosophy of Science 88 (1):67-82.
    In “Resurrecting Biological Essentialism,” I went against the consensus in the philosophy of biology by arguing that a Linnaean taxon, including a species, has an essence that is, at least partly,...
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  9.  25
    (1 other version)Barcodes and historical essences: a critique of the moderate version of intrinsic biological essentialism.Julio Torres Meléndez - 2019 - Humanities Journal of Valparaiso 14:75-89.
    The current tendency to moderate expectations that DNA barcode can be a method of discovering new species is due to the essentialist interpretation of this scientific analogy that is conceptually unsustainable. Something similar has happened in the philosophical field with the weakening of the initial versions of intrinsic biological essentialism. To examine the nature of this transition, I propose two principles that define a moderate EBI: one that assumes that the history of the taxon is metaphysically dependent on the (...)
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  10. The Ontological Status of Species and The Dilemma of New Biological Essentialism.Huitong Zhou - manuscript
    Species is one of the most basic concepts for almost all branches of biology, and it is also one of the most controversial concepts. An important aspect of "the species problem" is the question of "what the ontological status of species is". Traditionally, the answer to the issue about "the ontological status of species" is biological essentialism. Biological essentialism claims that species is a "natural kind", which argues that all and only the members of a species have a (...)
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  11. A New Argument For Intrinsic Biological Essentialism.Travis Dumsday - 2012 - Philosophical Quarterly 62 (248):486-504.
    Intrinsic biological essentialism (INBE) is the view that biological taxa have fixed identity conditions, conditions which consist at least in part of intrinsic properties. After a long period of near universal rejection within both philosophy of biology and theoretical biology, INBE is making a comeback. Here I attempt to support this revival by clarifying the nature of INBE, developing a new argument on its behalf, and addressing an important anti-essentialist critique.
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  12. What's Wrong with the New Biological Essentialism.Marc Ereshefsky - 2010 - Philosophy of Science 77 (5):674-685.
    The received view in the philosophy of biology is that biological taxa (species and higher taxa) do not have essences. Recently, some philosophers (Boyd, Devitt, Griffiths, LaPorte, Okasha, and Wilson) have suggested new forms of biological essentialism. They argue that according to these new forms of essentialism, biological taxa do have essences. This article critically evaluates the new biological essentialism. This article’s thesis is that the costs of adopting the new biological essentialism are many, yet the (...)
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  13. Is there neo-Nazi DNA? Ancestry tests and biological essentialism in American racism.Martha Smith Roberts - 2024 - In Jason W. M. Ellsworth & Andie Alexander, Fabricating authenticity. Bristol, CT: Equinox Publishing.
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  14.  28
    In Defense of Biological Essentialism.Stan W. Wallace - 2002 - Philosophia Christi 4 (1):29-43.
  15.  4
    An Essentialist View of Biological Sex Remains Alive and Well.John Wingard & Hans Madueme - 2024 - TheoLogica: An International Journal for Philosophy of Religion and Philosophical Theology 9 (1).
    In response to a recent article by Myron Penner, April Cordero, and Amanda Nichols in this journal, this essay offers a critical analysis. Their article makes a case against gender essentialism rooted in biology, drawing from the biology of sex determination. While commending their thorough exposition of the science of sex determination, we argue that most of their anthropological conclusions are unfounded. After reviewing their article, we present several criticisms that undermine their case. In particular, we take issue with (...)
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  16. Essentialism in Biology.John S. Wilkins - manuscript
    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 (...)
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  17. Biological Antecedents Essentialism.Margarida Hermida - forthcoming - Erkenntnis.
    An essentialist claim often made about organisms is that they could not have originated in different gametes. The thesis of gametic essentialism (GE) is usually understood either as a particular case of material origin essentialism, or as genetic essentialism. This paper argues that it should instead be understood in terms of the numerical identity of the gametes. Since gametes are living cells, their identity conditions should be the same as those of other living beings, and therefore involve (...)
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  18. Origin Essentialism in Biology.Makmiller Pedroso - 2014 - Philosophical Quarterly 64 (254):60-81.
    Kripke argues for origin essentialism, the view that the same individual cannot have multiple origins. Sober hypothesises that Kripke's origin essentialism applies to biological species. This paper shows that Sober's hypothesis fails. Because Kripke's original argument is invalid, it cannot vindicate Sober's proposal. Salmon offers an influential reformulation of Kripke's argument but his argument fails to extend to species: the notion of an individual's origin is too narrow to apply to species, and Salmon's argument rests on a thought (...)
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  19. Essentialism, history, and biological taxa.Makmiller Pedroso - 2012 - Studies in History and Philosophy of Science Part C: Studies in History and Philosophy of Biological and Biomedical Sciences 43 (1):182-190.
    de Queiroz (1995), Griffiths (1999) and LaPorte (2004) offer a new version of essentialism called "historical essentialism". According to this version of essentialism, relations of common ancestry are essential features of biological taxa. The main type of argument for this essentialism proposed by Griffiths (1999) and LaPorte (2004) is that the dominant school of classification, cladism, defines biological taxa in terms of common ancestry. The goal of this paper is to show that this argument for historical (...)
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  20.  21
    Intuitive biology, moral reasoning, and engineering life: Essentialist thinking and moral purity concerns shape risk assessments of synthetic biology technologies.Lauren Swiney - 2020 - Cognition 201 (C):104264.
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  21. Scientific essentialism in the light of classification practice in biology – a case study of phytosociology.Adam P. Kubiak & Rafał R. Wodzisz - 2012 - Zagadnienia Naukoznawstwa 48 (194):231-250.
    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 (...)
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  22. Individual essentialism in biology.Michael Devitt - 2018 - Biology and Philosophy 33 (5-6):39.
    A few philosophers of biology have recently explicitly rejected Essential Membership, the doctrine that if an individual organism belongs to a taxon, particularly a species, it does so essentially. But philosophers of biology have not addressed the broader issue, much discussed by metaphysicians on the basis of modal intuitions, of what is essential to the organism. In this paper, I address that issue from a biological basis, arguing for the Kripkean view that an organism has a partly intrinsic, partly historical, (...)
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  23. New Essentialism in Biology.Olivier Rieppel - 2010 - Philosophy of Science 77 (5):662-673.
    The architects of the modern synthesis banned essentialism from evolutionary theory. This rejection of essentialism was motivated by Darwin’s theory of natural selection, and the continuity of evolutionary transformation. Contemporary evolutionary biology witnesses a renaissance of essentialism in three contexts: “origin essentialism” with respect to species and supraspecific taxa, the bar coding of species on the basis of discontinuities of DNA variation between populations, and the search for laws of evolutionary developmental biology. Such “new essentialism (...)
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  24.  44
    Linaeus' biology was not essentialist.Mary P. Winsor - 2006 - Annals of the Missouri Botanical Garden 93 (1):2-7.
    The current picture of the history of taxonomy incorporates A. J. Cain's claim that Linnaeus strove to apply the logical method of definition taught by medieval followers of Aristotle. Cain's argument does not stand up to critical examination. Contrary to some published statements, there is no evidence that Linnaeus ever studied logic. His use of the words “genus” and “species” ruined the meaning they had in logic, and “essential” meant to him merely “taxonomically useful.” The essentialism story, a narrative (...)
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  25.  75
    How biological is essentialism.Susan A. Gelman & Lawrence A. Hirschfeld - 1999 - In Douglas L. Medin & Scott Atran, Folkbiology. MIT Press. pp. 403--446.
  26. When Traditional Essentialism Fails: Biological Natural Kinds.Robert A. Wilson, Matthew J. Barker & Ingo Brigandt - 2007 - Philosophical Topics 35 (1-2):189-215.
    Essentialism is widely regarded as a mistaken view of biological kinds, such as species. After recounting why (sections 2-3), we provide a brief survey of the chief responses to the “death of essentialism” in the philosophy of biology (section 4). We then develop one of these responses, the claim that biological kinds are homeostatic property clusters (sections 5-6) illustrating this view with several novel examples (section 7). Although this view was first expressed 20 years ago, and has received (...)
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  27.  89
    Beyond essentialist fallacies: Fine‐tuning ideology critique of appeals to biological sex differences.Rebekka Hufendiek - 2020 - Journal of Social Philosophy 53 (4):494-511.
  28. Can Evolutionary Biology do Without Aristotelian Essentialism?Stephen J. Boulter - 2012 - Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 70:83-103.
    It is usually maintained by biologists and philosophers alike that essentialism is incompatible with evolutionary biology, and that abandoning essentialism was a precondition of progress being made in the biological sciences. These claims pose a problem for anyone familiar with both evolutionary biology and current metaphysics. Very few current scientific theories enjoy the prestige of evolutionary biology. But essentialism – long in the bad books amongst both biologists and philosophers – has been enjoying a strong resurgence of (...)
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  29. The biological species as a Gene-flow community. Species essentialism does not imply species universalism.Werner Kunz & Markus Werning - unknown
    We defend a realistic attitude towards biological species. We argue that two species are not different species because they differ in intrinsic features, be they phenotypic or genomic, but because they are separated with regard to gene flow. There are no intrinsic species essences. However, there are relational ones. We argue that bearing a gene flow relation to conspecifics may serve as the essence of a species. Our view of the species as a Gene-Flow Community differs from Mayr’s definition of (...)
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  30. Real Essentialism.David S. Oderberg - 2007 - New York: Routledge.
    _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 (...)
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  31.  28
    The (Biological or Cultural) Essence of Essentialism: Implications for Policy Support among Dominant and Subordinated Groups.Nur Soylu Yalcinkaya, Sara Estrada-Villalta & Glenn Adams - 2017 - Frontiers in Psychology 8.
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    Public Discourse on the Biology of Alcohol Addiction: Implications for Stigma, Self-Control, Essentialism, and Coercive Policies in Pregnancy.Eric Racine, Emily Bell, Natalie Zizzo & Courtney Green - 2015 - Neuroethics 8 (2):177-186.
    International media have reported cases of pregnant women who have had their children apprehended by social services, or who were incarcerated or forced into treatment programs based on a history of substance use or lack of adherence to addiction treatment programs. Public discourse on the biology of addiction has been criticized for generating stigma and a diminished perception of self-control in individuals with an addiction, potentially contributing to coercive approaches and criminalization of women who misuse substances during pregnancy. We explored (...)
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  33.  36
    Semantic Essentialism and Populations.Mark Bauer - 2019 - Southwest Philosophy Review 35 (1):59-68.
    A core feature of teleosemantic proposals has been to rely on selective history to justify semantic functional classification. Recently, Nanay and Bauer have offered ahistorical teleosemantic proposals intended to bypass the numerous criticisms arising from the dependence on history. However, part of the attraction of the traditional reliance on history is that it seemingly allowed teleosemantics to mesh with biological practice. For example, Millikan, a key advocate for the selective historical approach, argues that biological kind identity rests on historical relations. (...)
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  34. Aristotelian Essentialism: Essence in the Age of Evolution.Christopher J. Austin - 2017 - Synthese 194 (7):2539-2556.
    The advent of contemporary evolutionary theory ushered in the eventual decline of Aristotelian Essentialism (Æ) – for it is widely assumed that essence does not, and cannot have any proper place in the age of evolution. This paper argues that this assumption is a mistake: if Æ can be suitably evolved, it need not face extinction. In it, I claim that if that theory’s fundamental ontology consists of dispositional properties, and if its characteristic metaphysical machinery is interpreted within the (...)
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  35. Three ways of resisting essentialism about natural kinds.Bence Nanay - 2011 - In Joseph Keim Campbell, Michael O'Rourke & Matthew H. Slater, Carving nature at its joints: natural kinds in metaphysics and science. Cambridge, MA, USA: MIT Press. pp. 175--97.
    Essentialism about natural kinds has three tenets. The first tenet is that all and only members of a natural kind has some essential properties. The second tenet is that these essential properties play a causal role. The third tenet is that they are explanatorily relevant. I examine the prospects of questioning these tenets and point out that arguing against the first and the second tenets of kind-essentialism would involve taking parts in some of the grand debates of philosophy. (...)
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  36.  96
    Explanatory essentialism and cryptic species.Milenko Lasnibat - 2025 - European Journal for Philosophy of Science 15 (1):1-22.
    Explanatory Essentialism (EE) is the view that a property is the essence of a kind because it causally explains the many properties that instances of the kind exhibit. This paper examines an application of EE to biological species, which I call Biological Explanatory Essentialism (BEE). BEE states that a particular biological origin is the essence of a species on the grounds that it causes certain organisms to display the group of properties the species is associated with. Evaluating BEE (...)
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  37. Aristotle’s Biology was not Essentialist.D. M. Balme - 1980 - Archiv für Geschichte der Philosophie 62 (1):1-12.
  38.  36
    Essentialism.Graeme Forbes - 1997 - In Bob Hale, Crispin Wright & Alexander Miller, A Companion to the Philosophy of Language. Chichester, West Sussex, UK: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 881–901.
    The term 'essentialism' in its popular usage is usually qualified in some way, as in 'biological essentialism', 'gender essentialism' and 'social essentialism'. The essentialist theses were defended on the grounds that denying them leads, under plausible assumptions, to pairs of worlds containing objects which are intrinsic and spatio‐temporal duplicates and yet which are numerically distinct. This chapter outlines some technical difficulties in getting the definitions of 'essential property' and 'individual essence' exactly right. It explains the idea (...)
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  39. Defending an Essentialist Ontology of Kinds, Laws, and Biological Taxa.Travis Dumsday - 2010 - Dissertation, Proquest
  40.  18
    Essentialist Biases Toward Psychiatric Disorders: Brain Disorders Are Presumed Innate.Iris Berent & Melanie Platt - 2021 - Cognitive Science 45 (4):e12970.
    A large campaign has sought to destigmatize psychiatric disorders by disseminating the view that they are in fact brain disorders. But when psychiatric disorders are associated with neurobiological correlates, laypeople's attitudes toward patients are harsher, and the prognoses seem poorer. Here, we ask whether these misconceptions could result from the essentialist presumption that brain disorders are innate. To this end, we invited laypeople to reason about psychiatric disorders that are diagnosed by either a brain or a behavioral test that were (...)
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  41. The Philosophical Roots of Racial Essentialism and Its Legacy.Naomi Zack - 2014 - Confluence: Journal of World Philosophies:85-98.
    Racial essentialism or the idea of unchanging racial substances that support human social hierarchy, was introduced into philosophy by David Hume and expanded upon by Immanuel Kant. These strong influences continued into W. E. B. Du Bois’ moral and spiritual idea of a black race, as a destiny to be fulfilled past a world of racism and inequality. In the twenty-first century, »the race debates« between »eliminativists« and »retentionists« swirl around the lack of independent biological scientific foundation for physical (...)
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  42. Evolutionary essentialism.Denis Walsh - 2006 - British Journal for the Philosophy of Science 57 (2):425-448.
    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 (...)
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  43.  44
    Genomic Essentialism: Its Provenance and Trajectory as an Anticipatory Ethical Concern.Maya Sabatello & Eric Juengst - 2019 - Hastings Center Report 49 (S1):10-18.
    Since the inception of large‐scale human genome research, there has been much caution about the risks of exacerbating a number of socially dangerous attitudes linked to human genetics. These attitudes are usually labeled with one of a family of genetic or genomic “isms” or “ations” such as “genetic essentialism,” “genetic determinism,” “genetic reductionism,” “geneticization,” “genetic stigmatization,” and “genetic discrimination.” The psychosocial processes these terms refer to are taken to exacerbate several ills that are similarly labeled, from medical racism and (...)
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  44.  41
    Does the anti-essentialist consensus about species rest on a mistake?Samir Okasha - unknown
    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 (...)
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  45. Non-essentialist methods in pre-Darwinian taxonomy.Mary P. Winsor - 2003 - Biology and Philosophy 18 (3):387-400.
    The current widespread belief that taxonomic methods used before Darwin were essentialist is ill-founded. The essentialist method developed by followers of Plato and Aristotle required definitions to state properties that are always present. Polythetic groups do not obey that requirement, whatever may have been the ontological beliefs of the taxonomist recognizing such groups. Two distinct methods of forming higher taxa, by chaining and by examplar, were widely used in the period between Linnaeus and Darwin, and both generated polythetic groups. Philosopher (...)
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  46. The Essentialist Aspect of Naive Theories.Michael Strevens - 2000 - Cognition 74 (149):175.
    Recent work on children’s inferences concerning biological and chemical categories has suggested that children (and perhaps adults) are essentialists— a view known as psychological essentialism. I distinguish three varieties of psychological essentialism and investigate the ways in which essentialism explains the inferences for which it is supposed to account. Essentialism succeeds in explaining the inferences, I argue, because it attributes to the child belief in causal laws connecting category membership and the possession of certain characteristic appearances (...)
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  47.  22
    Essentialism and Folksociology: Ethnicity Again.Martin Kanovsky - 2007 - Journal of Cognition and Culture 7 (3-4):241-281.
    The aim of this article is to show that empirical evidence suggests that no particular causal process of essence acquisition is constitutive for essentialism in folksociology. Innate potential and biological inheritance, however powerful they may be for the human cognitive mind in the domain of folkbiology, are far from necessary in essentialist folksociological classifications. Essentialism in folksociology is not defined by any particular causal process of essence acquisition. Even when we are able to detect the innateness in a (...)
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  48.  26
    Form, Essence, and Explanation in Aristotle's Biology.James G. Lennox - 2008 - In Georgios Anagnostopoulos, A Companion to Aristotle. Malden, MA: Wiley-Blackwell. pp. 348–367.
    This chapter contains sections titled: Introduction Essence and Explanation in Theory and Practice Form, Function, and Biological Essentialism The Priority of Being to Generation Conclusion Notes Bibliography.
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  49. Pre-Darwinian taxonomy and essentialism – a reply to Mary Winsor.David N. Stamos - 2005 - Biology and Philosophy 20 (1):79-96.
    Mary Winsor (2003) argues against the received view that pre-Darwinian taxonomy was characterized mainly by essentialism. She argues, instead, that the methods of pre-Darwinian taxonomists, in spite of whatever their beliefs, were that of clusterists, so that the received view, propagated mainly by certain modern biologists and philosophers of biology, should at last be put to rest as a myth. I argue that shes right when it comes to higher taxa, but wrong when it comes the most important category (...)
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  50.  81
    Is Identity Essentialism a Fundamental Feature of Human Cognition?Edouard Machery, Christopher Y. Olivola, Hyundeuk Cheon, Irma T. Kurniawan, Carlos Mauro, Noel Struchiner & Harry Susianto - 2023 - Cognitive Science 47 (5):e13292.
    The present research examines whether identity essentialism, an important component of psychological essentialism, is a fundamental feature of human cognition. Across three studies (Ntotal = 1723), we report evidence that essentialist intuitions about the identity of kinds are culturally dependent, demographically variable, and easily malleable. The first study considered essentialist intuitions in 10 different countries spread across four continents. Participants were presented with two scenarios meant to elicit essentialist intuitions. Their answers suggest that essentialist intuitions vary dramatically across (...)
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