Izvorni znanstveni članak
Devitt’s Promiscuous Essentialism
Zdenka Brzović
; Filozofski fakultet Sveučilišta u Rijeci, Rijeka, Hrvatska
Sažetak
In this paper I examine Michael Devitt’s version of essentialism, a view
that stirred a lot of debate amongst philosophers of biology by going
against the mainstream view of “death of essentialism” in evolutionary
biology. So far, much more attention was directed to refuting Devitt’s
view then to analyzing what his essentialism consists in. I go through
the main tenets of the essentialist view, examine the relation between
Devitt’s view and the so-called traditional essentialism, and the cluster
approaches to natural kinds. I conclude that Devitt holds a very fl exible
variety of pluralistic essentialism, that I term promiscuous essentialism.
The benefi t of holding such a view is that it can encompass a wide range
of categories, but its downside is that knowing the essence of a kind can
be minimally explanatory. For this reason, the criterion for privileging
certain kinds cannot follow from identifying their essence, which was
originally one of the main motivations for holding an essentialist view.
Ključne riječi
Natural kinds; species; essentialism; pluralism; philosophy of biology; cluster kinds.
Hrčak ID:
253554
URI
Datum izdavanja:
5.9.2018.
Posjeta: 378 *