Results for 'essentialism'

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  1. 8 Jens Ravnkilde.Howtoget Essentialism - 1975 - Danish Yearbook of Philosophy 12:8.
     
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  2. Scientific Essentialism.Brian Ellis - 2001 - New York: Cambridge University Press.
    Scientific Essentialism defends the view that the fundamental laws of nature depend on the essential properties of the things on which they are said to operate, and are therefore not independent of them. These laws are not imposed upon the world by God, the forces of nature or anything else, but rather are immanent in the world. Ellis argues that ours is a dynamic world consisting of more or less transient objects which are constantly interacting with each other, and (...)
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  3.  57
    Avicennian essentialism.Fedor Benevich - 2022 - British Journal for the History of Philosophy 30 (3):410-433.
    Essentialism can be defined as a metaphysical theory according to which things have essential and accidental properties. In this paper, I will address Avicennian essentialism, that is, essentialism...
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  4. Teleological Essentialism.David Rose & Shaun Nichols - 2019 - Cognitive Science 43 (4):e12725.
    Placeholder essentialism is the view that there is a causal essence that holds category members together, though we may not know what the essence is. Sometimes the placeholder can be filled in by scientific essences, such as when we acquire scientific knowledge that the atomic weight of gold is 79. We challenge the view that placeholders are elaborated by scientific essences. On our view, if placeholders are elaborated, they are elaborated Aristotelian essences, a telos. Utilizing the same kinds of (...)
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  5. Psychological Essentialism and the Structure of Concepts.Eleonore Neufeld - 2022 - Philosophy Compass 17 (5):e12823.
    Psychological essentialism is the hypothesis that humans represent some categories as having an underlying essence that unifies members of a category and is causally responsible for their typical attributes and behaviors. Throughout the past several decades, psychological essentialism has emerged as an extremely active area of research in cognitive science. More recently, it has also attracted attention from philosophers, who put the empirical results to use in many different philosophical areas, ranging from philosophy of mind and cognitive science (...)
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  6. 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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  7.  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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  8. Essentialist Plenitude and the Semantics of Proper Names.Uriah Kriegel - 2019 - Metaphysics 2 (1):16-25.
    A number of prominent metaphysicians have recently defended a set of ideas which I will call ‘essentialist plenitude.’ Very roughly, and to a first approximation, essentialist plenitude says that wherever there is an object with properties P1, …, Pn there is in fact a plenitude of coincident objects that differ only in the distribution of essentiality and accidentality across P1, …, Pn (§1). The main purpose of this paper is to arouse the suspicion that essentialist plenitude may have far-reaching consequences (...)
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  9.  24
    Essentialism: A Wittgensteinian Critique.Garth L. Hallett - 1991 - SUNY Press.
    After tracing the recent decline in explicitly essentialistic theories, Hallett (Dean of the College of Philosophy and letters, St. Louis U.) critically surveys the essentialism still strongly operative in much philosophical reasoning, then ...
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  10.  34
    Essentialism.Graeme Forbes - 1997 - In Bob Hale, Crispin Wright & Alexander Miller (eds.), 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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  11. Dispositional essentialism and the grounding of natural modality.Siegfried Jaag - 2014 - Philosophers' Imprint 14.
    Dispositional essentialism is a non-Humean view about the essences of certain fundamental or natural properties that looms large in recent metaphysics , not least because it promises to explain neatly the natural modalities such as laws of nature, counterfactuals, causation and chance. In the current paper, however, several considerations are presented that indicate a serious tension between its essentialist core thesis and natural “metaphysical” interpretations of its central explanatory claims.
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  12. Dispositional Essentialism and the Nature of Powerful Properties.William A. Bauer - 2013 - Disputatio 5 (35):1-19.
    Dispositional essentialism maintains that all sparse properties are essentially powerful. Two conceptions of sparse properties appear compatible with dispositional essentialism: sparse properties as pure powers or as powerful qualities. This paper compares the two views, criticizes the powerful qualities view, and then develops a new theory of pure powers, termed Point Theory. This theory neutralizes the main advantage powerful qualities appear to possess over pure powers—explaining the existence of powers during latency periods. The paper discusses the relation between (...)
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  13. Teleological Essentialism: Generalized.David Rose & Shaun Nichols - 2020 - Cognitive Science 44 (3):e12818.
    Natural/social kind essentialism is the view that natural kind categories, both living and non-living natural kinds, as well as social kinds (e.g., race, gender), are essentialized. On this view, artifactual kinds are not essentialized. Our view—teleological essentialism—is that a broad range of categories are essentialized in terms of teleology, including artifacts. Utilizing the same kinds of experiments typically used to provide evidence of essentialist thinking—involving superficial change (study 1), transformation of insides (study 2) and inferences about offspring (study (...)
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  14. Anti-essentialism, modal relativity, and alternative material-origin counterfactuals.Frederique Janssen-Lauret - 2021 - Synthese 199 (3-4):8379-8398.
    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, (...)
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  15. Reconsidering the Dispositional Essentialist Canon.Samuel Kimpton-Nye - 2021 - Philosophical Studies 178 (10):3421-3441.
    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 (...)
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  16.  19
    Haecceities: Essentialism, Identity, and Abstraction.Jeffrey Strayer - 2017 - Brill.
    _Haecceities: Essentialism, Identity, andion_ is an artistic and philosophical examination of the limits of Abstraction in art and of kinds of radical identity determined in the identification of those limits. Strayer’s results challenge common notions of art and identity.
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  17. An Essentialist Theory of the Meaning of Slurs.Eleonore Neufeld - 2019 - Philosophers' Imprint 19.
    In this paper, I develop an essentialist model of the semantics of slurs. I defend the view that slurs are a species of kind terms: Slur concepts encode mini-theories which represent an essence-like element that is causally connected to a set of negatively-valenced stereotypical features of a social group. The truth-conditional contribution of slur nouns can then be captured by the following schema: For a given slur S of a social group G and a person P, S is true of (...)
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  18.  41
    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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  19.  81
    The Essentialist Inference.Jesse M. Mulder - 2013 - Australasian Journal of Philosophy 91 (4):755-769.
    It is often claimed that principles of individuation imply essential properties of the things individuated. For example, sets are individuated by their members, hence sets have their members essentially. But how does this inference work? First I discuss the form of such inferences, and conclude that the essentialist inference is not a purely formal matter: although there is a form which all principles of individuation have in common, it is not true that any statement of that form is a principle (...)
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  20. Psychological Essentialism and Dehumanization.Maria Kronfeldner - 2020 - In Routledge Handbook of Dehumanization. London, New York: Routledge.
    In this Chapter, Maria Kronfeldner discusses whether psychological essentialism is a necessary part of dehumanization. This involves different elements of essentialism, and a narrow and a broad way of conceptualizing psychological essentialism, the first akin to natural kind thinking, the second based on entitativity. She first presents authors that have connected essentialism with dehumanization. She then introduces the error theory of psychological essentialism regarding the category of the human, and distinguishes different elements of psychological (...). On that basis, Kronfeldner connects historical, socio-psychological, and philosophical insights in order to show that although essentialism can act as a catalyst for dehumanization, it is not necessary for it. Examples relate to dehumanization in the context of colonialism and evolutionary thinking, to the history of dehumanizing women from Aristotle to 19th-century craniology, and to contemporary self-dehumanization and ‘lesser mind’ attribution. (shrink)
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  21. The New Aristotelian Essentialists.Harold W. Noonan - 2018 - Metaphysica 19 (1):87-93.
    In recent years largely due to the seminal work of Kit Fine and that of Jonathan Lowe there has been a resurgence of interest in the concept of essence and the project of explaining de re necessity in terms of it. Of course, Quine rejected what he called Aristotelian essentialism in his battle against quantified modal logic. But what he and Kripke debated was a notion of essence defined in terms of de re necessity. The new Aristotelian essentialists regard (...)
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  22. 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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  23.  20
    The Relation Between Essentialist Beliefs and Evolutionary Reasoning.Andrew Shtulman & Laura Schulz - 2008 - Cognitive Science 32 (6):1049-1062.
    Historians of science have pointed to essentialist beliefs about species as major impediments to the discovery of natural selection. The present study investigated whether such beliefs are impediments to learning this concept as well. Participants (43 children aged 4–9 and 34 adults) were asked to judge the variability of various behavioral and anatomical properties across different members of the same species. Adults who accepted within‐species variation—both actual and potential—were significantly more likely to demonstrate a selection‐based understanding of evolution than adults (...)
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  24. 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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  25. On deriving essentialism from the theory of reference.Jussi Haukioja - 2015 - Philosophical Studies 172 (8):2141-2151.
    Causal theories of reference for natural kind terms are widely agreed to play a central role in arguments for the claim that theoretical identity statements such as “Water is H2O” are necessary, if true. However, there is also fairly wide-spread agreement, due to the arguments of Nathan Salmon, that causal theories of reference do not alone establish such essentialism about natural kinds: an independent, non-trivial essentialist premise is also needed. In this paper I will question this latter agreement. I (...)
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  26. Essentialist Blindness Would Not Preclude Counterfactual Knowledge.Sònia Roca-Royes - 2012 - Philosophia Scientiae 16 (2):149-172.
    L’objectif de cet article est double. Il défend d’abord, contre une menace potentielle, la thèse selon laquelle une capacité pour la connaissance essentialiste ne doit pas figurer parmi les capacités fondamentales pour la connaissance des contrefactuels. Il évalue ensuite une conséquence de cette thèse, ou du moins de la défense que j’en fais qui s’appuie sur une discussion des théories de Kment et de Williamson portant sur le lien entre la modalité et les contrefactuels.
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  27. 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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  28.  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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  29. 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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  30. Modern essentialism and the problem of individuation of spacetime points.Andreas Bartels - 1996 - Erkenntnis 45 (1):25--43.
    In this paper Modern Essentialism is used to solve a problem of individuation of spacetime points in General Relativity that has been raised by a New Leibnizian Argument against spacetime substantivalism, elaborated by Earman and Norton. An earlier essentialistic solution, proposed by Maudlin, is criticized as being against both the spirit of metrical essentialism and the fundamental principles of General Relativity. I argue for a modified essentialistic account of spacetime points that avoids those obstacles.
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  31. Essentialist Beliefs About Bodily Transplants in the United States and India.Meredith Meyer, Sarah-Jane Leslie, Susan A. Gelman & Sarah M. Stilwell - 2013 - Cognitive Science 37 (1):668-710.
    Psychological essentialism is the belief that some internal, unseen essence or force determines the common outward appearances and behaviors of category members. We investigated whether reasoning about transplants of bodily elements showed evidence of essentialist thinking. Both Americans and Indians endorsed the possibility of transplants conferring donors' personality, behavior, and luck on recipients, consistent with essentialism. Respondents also endorsed essentialist effects even when denying that transplants would change a recipient's category membership (e.g., predicting that a recipient of a (...)
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  32.  44
    Against essentialism in theories of rational action: A reply to Raymond Boudon.Stephan Fuchs - 1993 - International Studies in the Philosophy of Science 7 (1):37 – 39.
    (1993). Against essentialism in theories of rational action: A reply to Raymond Boudon. International Studies in the Philosophy of Science: Vol. 7, No. 1, pp. 37-39.
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  33. Dispositional essentialism and the possibility of a law-abiding miracle.Toby Handfield - 2001 - Philosophical Quarterly 51 (205):484-494.
  34. Essentialism.Marilyn Frye - manuscript
    "Essentialism," an invited paper at the meetings of the Central Division of the American Philosophical Association, April 2001.
     
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  35. Aristotelian essentialism in David Lewis's theory.Cristina Nencha - 2022 - Philosophical Inquiries 10 (2):9-37.
    David Lewis is usually thought to reject what Quine called “Aristotelian essentialism”. The starting point of this paper is to define and explain Aristotelian essentialism and locate it in the context of the criticism that Quine made of quantified modal logic. Indeed, according to Quine, Aristotelian essentialism would be one of the consequences of accepting quantified modal logic. After having explained Lewis’s stance in the Quinean debate against quantified modal logic, this paper will deal with the question (...)
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  36. 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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  37. Essentialism and direct realism: Some late medieval perspectives.Dominik Perler - 2000 - Topoi 19 (2):111-122.
    Perler, D. Essentialism and Direct Realism: Some Late Medieval Perspectives. Topoi 19, 111–122 (2000).
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  38. Causal essentialism and the identity of indiscernibles.Cameron Gibbs - 2018 - Philosophical Studies 175 (9):2331-2351.
    Causal essentialists hold that a property essentially bears its causal and nomic relations. Further, as many causal essentialists have noted, the main motivations for causal essentialism also motivate holding that properties are individuated in terms of their causal and nomic relations. This amounts to a kind of identity of indiscernibles thesis; properties that are indiscernible with respect to their causal and nomic relations are identical. This can be compared with the more well-known identity of indiscernibles thesis, according to which (...)
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  39.  33
    Essentialism, Vitalism, and the GMO Debate.Veronika Szántó - 2018 - Philosophy and Technology 31 (2):189-208.
    There has been a long-standing opposition to genetically modified organisms worldwide. Some studies have tried to identify the deep-lying philosophical, conceptual as well as psychological motivations for this opposition. Philosophical essentialism, psychological essentialism, and vitalism have been proposed as possible candidates. I approach the plausibility of the claim that these notions are related to GMO opposition from a historical perspective. Vitalism and philosophical essentialism have been associated with anti-GMO stance on account of their purported hostility to species (...)
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  40. Scientific Essentialism.Lenny Clapp - 2002 - Philosophical Review 111 (4):589-594.
    Scientific Essentialism defends the view that the fundamental laws of nature depend on the essential properties of the things on which they are said to operate, and are therefore not independent of them. These laws are not imposed upon the world by God, the forces of nature, or anything else, but rather are immanent in the world. Ellis argues that ours is a dynamic world consisting of more or less transient objects that are constantly interacting with each other, and (...)
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  41. 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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  42. (1 other version)Psychological essentialism and semantic externalism Evidence for externalism in lay speakers' language use.Jussi Jylkka, Henry Railo & Jussi Haukioja - 2008 - Proceedings of the Xxii World Congress of Philosophy 39 (1):105-110.
    Some experimental studies have recently claimed to undermine semantic externalism about natural kind terms. However, it is unclear how philosophical accounts of reference can be experimentally tested. We present two externalistic adaptations of psychological placeholder essentialism, a strict externalist and a hybrid externalist view, which are experimentally testable. We examine Braisby’s et al. (1996) study which claims to undermine externalism, and argue that the study fails in its aims. We conducted two experiments, the results of which undermine internalism and (...)
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  43. Essentialism and the necessity of the laws of nature.Alice Drewery - 2005 - Synthese 144 (3):381-396.
    In this paper I discuss and evaluate different arguments for the view that the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary. I conclude that essentialist arguments from the nature of natural kinds fail to establish that essences are ontologically more basic than laws, and fail to offer an a priori argument for the necessity of all causal laws. Similar considerations carry across to the argument from the dispositionalist view of properties, which may end up placing unreasonable constraints on property identity across (...)
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  44.  90
    Essentialism and a folk-taxonomic approach to the classification of psychopathology.Elizabeth H. Flanagan - 2000 - Philosophy, Psychiatry, and Psychology 7 (3):183-189.
  45.  78
    On Essentialism and Existentialism in the Husserlian Platonism: A Reflexion Based on Modal Logic.Carlos Lobo, Cleverson Leite Bastos & Carlos Eduardo de Carvalho Vargas - 2015 - Axiomathes 25 (3):335-343.
    Departing from modal logic, Jean-Yves Girard, as a logician interested in philosophy, presented a distinction between essentialism and existentialism in logic. Carlos Lobo reflected about the Girard’s concept to reinterpret the Husserlian Platonism in regard of the status of logical modalities. We start rescuing the notion of modal logic in the Edmund Husserl’s works, especially Formal and Transcendental Logic and First Philosophy. Developing this reflexion, we propose a new contribution to this discussion, reinterpreting the platonic influence in the Husserlian (...)
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  46.  57
    The fragility of origin essentialism: Where mitochondrial ‘replacement’ meets the non‐identity problem.Tim Lewens - 2021 - Bioethics 35 (7):615-622.
    Few discussions of the ethics of mitochondrial ‘replacement’ techniques have drawn significant ethical distinctions between the two approaches now legal in the U.K. However, Anthony Wrigley, Stephen Wilkinson and John Appleby have together argued that under some circumstances pronuclear transfer (PNT) may be in better ethical standing than maternal spindle transfer (MST). They base their conclusion on what they allege to be different implications of the techniques with respect to non‐identity considerations, which they ground on a version of origin (...). I raise a series of problems for their argument, which have cautionary implications for invocations of origin essentialism that go beyond specialized debates regarding MST and PNT. I argue that (i) origin essentialism is a fragile foundation for non‐identity considerations; (ii) gametic essentialism, which Wrigley et al. believe licenses their claims, is more questionable than origin essentialism; (iii) gametic essentialism does not straightforwardly justify their conclusion; and (iv) their conclusion in fact relies on an especially dubious position that we can call chromosomal origin essentialism. No good reasons have yet been supplied to distinguish PNT from MST on ethical grounds, and one should be wary of basing claims with practical impact on fragile foundations relating to origin essentialism. (shrink)
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  47. 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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  48. Lockean Essentialism and the Possibility of Miracles.Nathan Rockwood - 2018 - Southern Journal of Philosophy 56 (2):293-310.
    If the laws of nature are metaphysically necessary, then it appears that miracles are metaphysically impossible. Yet Locke accepts both Essentialism, which takes the laws to be metaphysically necessary, and the possibility of miracles. I argue that the apparent conflict here can be resolved if the laws are by themselves insufficient for guaranteeing the outcome of a particular event. This suggests that, on Locke’s view, the laws of nature entail how an object would behave absent divine intervention. While other (...)
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  49. Essentialism in modal logic.Ruth Barcan Marcus - 1967 - Noûs 1 (1):91-96.
  50. Essentialist Explanation.Martin Glazier - 2017 - Philosophical Studies 174 (11):2871-2889.
    Recent years have seen an explosion of interest in metaphysical explanation, and philosophers have fixed on the notion of ground as the conceptual tool with which such explanation should be investigated. I will argue that this focus on ground is myopic and that some metaphysical explanations that involve the essences of things cannot be understood in terms of ground. Such ‘essentialist’ explanation is of interest, not only for its ubiquity in philosophy, but for its being in a sense an ultimate (...)
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