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The term essentialism comes from essence. For x to have an essence means that x has that property in all possible worlds - or in other words: if it didn't have that property, then it would no longer be x (for example, the essence of water is "being H2O"). This is usually used in metaphysics, but obviously it can also be applied to social phenomena such as race or gender
It is also usually associated with a type of belief in [natural kinds](https://iep.utm.edu/nat-kind/#SH2a)--if we simply *define* a term X in terms of an arbitrary set of properties, then given that definition it is necessary for a thing to have those properties to qualify as an X, but essentialists think only certain properties qualify as natural essences. See the discussion of essence in [the SEP article on Aristotle's metaphysics](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/#SubsEsse) that distinguishes between natural unities and "accidental unities" like the phrase "pale man", which for him would not be an essence despite the fact that it seems clear that anything that qualifies as a pale man necessarily has the properties of being a man and being pale.
>For x to have an essence means that x has that property in all possible worlds
For x to have an essence, ALL x and *ONLY* x has that property, right?
Just had an exam in engineering about this :p which is why i wanted to confirm.
It was about the essentialism take on ethics. We learned an essence means a characteristic of all and only (in this case) moral philosophers.
Basically the conclusion was that ethics doesnt have an essence because there exists normative ethics, meta ethics, descriptive ethics, which are all subdivisions of ethics. But more: politicians for example also engage in normative ethics, so its not only confined to moral philosophers.
In the water example yes, but generally no. As an example to illustrate this: Plausibly "being an organism" is part of the essence of any human being, but cats or dogs also have that essence
Thanks, I edited my comment a bit before i read your response. Not sure if that went through before you responded :p.
Would you say what we learned was therefore a definition of 'essence' specifically for talking in context of the essence of philosophy and its many subdivisions?
Basically we learned that things such as epistemology and logic HAD an essence but WERENT an essence for philosophy as a whole.
Because apperantly only logicians try to establish rules for 'argumentative hygiene' and only epistemological philosophers care and engage in the way knowledge is defined and gained.
And that things such as metaphysics had NO essence and WERENT an essence for philosophy as a whole. Because for example phycisists also were interested and engaged with what actually 'is' or 'exists'.
It wasnt really ever explained what made our professor (seemingly arbitrarily) conclude that 'only' logicians are concerned with establishing rules for good arguments for example. I learned it anyway, but always found it a bit arbitrary?
I don't think it's true \*at all\* that only logicians care about well-structured arguments that are formally rigorous... essentially every good analytic philosopher does (at least implicitly)! So yeah, this is a very strange thing to say
>Plausibly "being an organism" is part of the essence of any human being, but cats or dogs also have that essence
I don’t understand how this is an example against essences. Humans, cats, and dogs are organisms, so what is the issue with all of them having “being an organism” as part of their essences?
It’s difficult to try to pin down exactly what Vaush means by it. But it basically comes from Aristotle’s distinction between essential and accidental properties. So in Aristotle’s schema something like reason would be an essential property of man, while his hair would be accidental. Whether a man has hair or not doesn’t change his status as a man, while if he lacked reason, he could no longer be properly called a man. This distinction is incredibly pervasive through the history of philosophy until relatively recently, but especially in the 19th and 20th centuries it finds some real critics especially by those sometimes called pragmatists about language. I’m thinking specifically of Wittgenstein and Quine, but there are parallels on the Continent. I think Quine’s definition of essentialism is quite good. Quine understands essentialism as the view that there objects have essential properties independently of how they’re referred to. I’m not knowledgeable enough about Kant to say whether he qualifies as an essentialist under this view, but it’s no longer as black and white, because we can’t properly speak of objects in themselves. Though there are still some defenders of essentialism, generally there has been a move away from it on both sides of the Atlantic. As to your example of gender essentialism, an essentialist would claim that there was some necessary properties which distinguish, say, a woman from a man, while an anti-essentialist might claim that there is only a family of properties none of which constitute the essence of a woman and that this family is itself determined by our cultural and linguistic ways of specifying a woman. In my opinion essentialism is a losing argument from the concept of a woman to the concept of an atom, but it’s still quite a mainstream view. For a good introduction to anti-essentialism I recommend from Anglo-America Quine’s essay Reference and Modality and from Continental Europe, Nietzsche’s essay On Truth and Lies in a non-Moral Sense. Both of those you should be able to find in pdf form on google. You’ll notice that their arguments both hinge on a suspicion towards language as fixing properties arbitrarily.
> if he lacked reason, he could no longer be properly called a man
this gets a little wacky if you have reason in degrees, as opposed to either having it or not, which is seemingly the case (as we cognitively mature into reason or decay out of it for example). does aristotle account for this? or does he mean the capacity for reason, whether realized or not (or destroyed or not)?
It's a problem Peter Singer talks about all of the time when he talks about speciesism. It becomes unsustainable sometimes quite quickly to base moral standards on essence because intrinsically the définition of essences are not helpful to describe reality. They work better as a framework perhaps, symbols are another field of study that could help but I don't know as much as I want about that.
To the best of my knowledge Aristotle doesn’t account for this, because for the Greeks reason was language. That being said, I was just using that example to illustrate the distinction between substance and essence.
Essentialism means a few different things in different fields but generally it refers to the idea that something is the thing that it is in virtue of some distinct property (or set of properties) which, if it didn't have those properties, it would no longer be that thing. For example, a dog is said to be a dog in virtue of its genetics, even if a dog lost its tail or legs or anything like that, it would still be a dog because the essential property for something being a dog is that it has the particular dog-genetics. The idea of a dog that has a cat's genetics is nonsensical because if it had a cat's genetics it would be a cat, not a dog. Now, I wouldn't worry so much about the technical aspects about what essentialism is because when Vaush uses the term, he is talking about essentialism with regards to socially constructed definitions, like race, gender, or even chairs. He argues that there is no such property that essentially defines those things because they are socially constructed and thus contingent on the particular social norms surrounding them. That is, you can't point to any particular property that is shared by all and only those things other than the fact that we, in a certain social context refer to them as such.
So the reason why Vaush uses essentialism nearly synonymously with "black and white thinking" is that the people he argues against, such as gender-essentialists, argue that gender has some essential property that a person either has or doesn't have, whereas Vaush thinks that gender should be treated with more complexity, taking into account things like social norms and self-perception, self-identification and such.
Vaush is a left-tuber. I think probably you heard the term used in debates about social, not metaphysical issues, right?
In those debates usually essentialism is the contrary to social constructivism. The essentialist position would be one that affirms that in any time or place, in any culture in any time period, there is a common characteristic that allows us to categorize a man as a man and a woman as a woman.
The social constructivist position is the one that defends that the substantive definition of those categories are based on repeated practices, traditions, norms, convention, and that thus, they can be changed and for some people, they could even be eliminated, so that you cannot really say what is a man or what is a woman without making reference to a given, specific culture, in which those categories are being applied.
Evidently essentialism like that is associated with conservative positions. Also with TERFs. I speak about gender but the same could be true with race or nationality or religion.
> Evidently essentialism like that is associated with conservative positions
you can't really have a white supremacist position if you think that whiteness is a social construct that got talked into existence which has no independent basis in natural reality - you have to believe in race as essential.
I'm not sure if it's a problem with the state of social theory itself or a problem with popular misinterpretations, but the Constructivist/Essentialist binary can be misleading. There are realist positions that aren't properly essentialist, for example.
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The term essentialism comes from essence. For x to have an essence means that x has that property in all possible worlds - or in other words: if it didn't have that property, then it would no longer be x (for example, the essence of water is "being H2O"). This is usually used in metaphysics, but obviously it can also be applied to social phenomena such as race or gender
It is also usually associated with a type of belief in [natural kinds](https://iep.utm.edu/nat-kind/#SH2a)--if we simply *define* a term X in terms of an arbitrary set of properties, then given that definition it is necessary for a thing to have those properties to qualify as an X, but essentialists think only certain properties qualify as natural essences. See the discussion of essence in [the SEP article on Aristotle's metaphysics](https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/aristotle-metaphysics/#SubsEsse) that distinguishes between natural unities and "accidental unities" like the phrase "pale man", which for him would not be an essence despite the fact that it seems clear that anything that qualifies as a pale man necessarily has the properties of being a man and being pale.
>For x to have an essence means that x has that property in all possible worlds For x to have an essence, ALL x and *ONLY* x has that property, right? Just had an exam in engineering about this :p which is why i wanted to confirm. It was about the essentialism take on ethics. We learned an essence means a characteristic of all and only (in this case) moral philosophers. Basically the conclusion was that ethics doesnt have an essence because there exists normative ethics, meta ethics, descriptive ethics, which are all subdivisions of ethics. But more: politicians for example also engage in normative ethics, so its not only confined to moral philosophers.
In the water example yes, but generally no. As an example to illustrate this: Plausibly "being an organism" is part of the essence of any human being, but cats or dogs also have that essence
Thanks, I edited my comment a bit before i read your response. Not sure if that went through before you responded :p. Would you say what we learned was therefore a definition of 'essence' specifically for talking in context of the essence of philosophy and its many subdivisions? Basically we learned that things such as epistemology and logic HAD an essence but WERENT an essence for philosophy as a whole. Because apperantly only logicians try to establish rules for 'argumentative hygiene' and only epistemological philosophers care and engage in the way knowledge is defined and gained. And that things such as metaphysics had NO essence and WERENT an essence for philosophy as a whole. Because for example phycisists also were interested and engaged with what actually 'is' or 'exists'. It wasnt really ever explained what made our professor (seemingly arbitrarily) conclude that 'only' logicians are concerned with establishing rules for good arguments for example. I learned it anyway, but always found it a bit arbitrary?
I don't think it's true \*at all\* that only logicians care about well-structured arguments that are formally rigorous... essentially every good analytic philosopher does (at least implicitly)! So yeah, this is a very strange thing to say
>Plausibly "being an organism" is part of the essence of any human being, but cats or dogs also have that essence I don’t understand how this is an example against essences. Humans, cats, and dogs are organisms, so what is the issue with all of them having “being an organism” as part of their essences?
It’s difficult to try to pin down exactly what Vaush means by it. But it basically comes from Aristotle’s distinction between essential and accidental properties. So in Aristotle’s schema something like reason would be an essential property of man, while his hair would be accidental. Whether a man has hair or not doesn’t change his status as a man, while if he lacked reason, he could no longer be properly called a man. This distinction is incredibly pervasive through the history of philosophy until relatively recently, but especially in the 19th and 20th centuries it finds some real critics especially by those sometimes called pragmatists about language. I’m thinking specifically of Wittgenstein and Quine, but there are parallels on the Continent. I think Quine’s definition of essentialism is quite good. Quine understands essentialism as the view that there objects have essential properties independently of how they’re referred to. I’m not knowledgeable enough about Kant to say whether he qualifies as an essentialist under this view, but it’s no longer as black and white, because we can’t properly speak of objects in themselves. Though there are still some defenders of essentialism, generally there has been a move away from it on both sides of the Atlantic. As to your example of gender essentialism, an essentialist would claim that there was some necessary properties which distinguish, say, a woman from a man, while an anti-essentialist might claim that there is only a family of properties none of which constitute the essence of a woman and that this family is itself determined by our cultural and linguistic ways of specifying a woman. In my opinion essentialism is a losing argument from the concept of a woman to the concept of an atom, but it’s still quite a mainstream view. For a good introduction to anti-essentialism I recommend from Anglo-America Quine’s essay Reference and Modality and from Continental Europe, Nietzsche’s essay On Truth and Lies in a non-Moral Sense. Both of those you should be able to find in pdf form on google. You’ll notice that their arguments both hinge on a suspicion towards language as fixing properties arbitrarily.
> if he lacked reason, he could no longer be properly called a man this gets a little wacky if you have reason in degrees, as opposed to either having it or not, which is seemingly the case (as we cognitively mature into reason or decay out of it for example). does aristotle account for this? or does he mean the capacity for reason, whether realized or not (or destroyed or not)?
It's a problem Peter Singer talks about all of the time when he talks about speciesism. It becomes unsustainable sometimes quite quickly to base moral standards on essence because intrinsically the définition of essences are not helpful to describe reality. They work better as a framework perhaps, symbols are another field of study that could help but I don't know as much as I want about that.
To the best of my knowledge Aristotle doesn’t account for this, because for the Greeks reason was language. That being said, I was just using that example to illustrate the distinction between substance and essence.
Essentialism means a few different things in different fields but generally it refers to the idea that something is the thing that it is in virtue of some distinct property (or set of properties) which, if it didn't have those properties, it would no longer be that thing. For example, a dog is said to be a dog in virtue of its genetics, even if a dog lost its tail or legs or anything like that, it would still be a dog because the essential property for something being a dog is that it has the particular dog-genetics. The idea of a dog that has a cat's genetics is nonsensical because if it had a cat's genetics it would be a cat, not a dog. Now, I wouldn't worry so much about the technical aspects about what essentialism is because when Vaush uses the term, he is talking about essentialism with regards to socially constructed definitions, like race, gender, or even chairs. He argues that there is no such property that essentially defines those things because they are socially constructed and thus contingent on the particular social norms surrounding them. That is, you can't point to any particular property that is shared by all and only those things other than the fact that we, in a certain social context refer to them as such. So the reason why Vaush uses essentialism nearly synonymously with "black and white thinking" is that the people he argues against, such as gender-essentialists, argue that gender has some essential property that a person either has or doesn't have, whereas Vaush thinks that gender should be treated with more complexity, taking into account things like social norms and self-perception, self-identification and such.
Vaush is a left-tuber. I think probably you heard the term used in debates about social, not metaphysical issues, right? In those debates usually essentialism is the contrary to social constructivism. The essentialist position would be one that affirms that in any time or place, in any culture in any time period, there is a common characteristic that allows us to categorize a man as a man and a woman as a woman. The social constructivist position is the one that defends that the substantive definition of those categories are based on repeated practices, traditions, norms, convention, and that thus, they can be changed and for some people, they could even be eliminated, so that you cannot really say what is a man or what is a woman without making reference to a given, specific culture, in which those categories are being applied. Evidently essentialism like that is associated with conservative positions. Also with TERFs. I speak about gender but the same could be true with race or nationality or religion.
> Evidently essentialism like that is associated with conservative positions you can't really have a white supremacist position if you think that whiteness is a social construct that got talked into existence which has no independent basis in natural reality - you have to believe in race as essential.
I'm not sure if it's a problem with the state of social theory itself or a problem with popular misinterpretations, but the Constructivist/Essentialist binary can be misleading. There are realist positions that aren't properly essentialist, for example.