A Correct Account of Essentialism?

Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy

The heated feminist debates over 'essentialism' of the 1980s and early 1990s have largely died away, yet they raised fundamental questions for feminist moral and political philosophy which have still to be fully explored. Centrally at issue in feminist controversies over essentialism was whether there are any shared characteristics common to all women, which unify them as a group. Many leading ...

Origins of Essentialism 1 on the Functional Origins of Essentialism

This essay examines the proposal that psychological essentialism results from a history of natural selection acting on human representation and inference systems. It has been argued that the features that distinguish essentialist representational systems are especially well suited for representing natural kinds. If the evolved function of essentialism is to exploit the rich inductive potential ...

Dispositional essentialism

Dispositions, Mellor once remarked, are as shameful in many eyes as pregnant spinsters used to be, ' ideally to be explained away, or entitled to a shotgun wedding to take the name of some decently real categorical property' [18]. This 'Victorian prejudice' against dispositions still exists. On reflection, this fact is perhaps not really surprising. Dispositions have dallied in most corners of ...

Topological Essentialism

This paper analyses topological variants of mereological essentialism, the thesis that an object cannot have different parts than the ones it has. In particular, we examine de dicto and de re versions of two theses: (i) that an object cannot change its external connections (e.g., adjacent objects cannot be separated), and (ii) that an object cannot change its topological genus (e.g., a doughnut...

In Defense of Essentialism