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Essentialism, in its broadest sense, is any philosophy that acknowledges the primacy of essence. Unlike existentialism, which posits "being" as the fundamental reality, the essentialist ontology must be approached from a metaphysical perspective. Empirical knowledge is developed from experience of a relational universe whose components and ...
Biological essentialism may refer to: Biological determinism, the belief that human behavior is biologically predetermined; Gender essentialism, the belief that human genders are biologically innate; Essentialism#Biological essentialism, the belief that species are unchanging throughout time
Scientific essentialism, a view espoused by Saul Kripke and Hilary Putnam, [1] maintains that there exist essential properties that objects possess (or instantiate) necessarily. In other words, having such and such essential properties is a necessary condition for membership in a given natural kind.
With the beginnings of modern biological taxonomy in the late 17th century, two opposed ideas influenced Western biological thinking: essentialism, the belief that every species has essential characteristics that are unalterable, a concept which had developed from medieval Aristotelian metaphysics, and that fit well with natural theology; and ...
A prominent question in the philosophy of biology is whether biology can be reduced to lower-level sciences such as chemistry and physics. Materialism is the view that every biological system including organisms consists of nothing except the interactions of molecules; it is opposed to vitalism.
Philosophy of psychology also closely monitors contemporary work conducted in cognitive neuroscience, cognitive psychology, and artificial intelligence, for example questioning whether psychological phenomena can be explained using the methods of neuroscience, evolutionary theory, and computational modeling, respectively.
First published 1988 in the Journal of Philosophy.) [61] The purpose of the chapter is to defend Cohen's contention in his KMTH that there is an autonomous tendency of the productive forces to develop, where "autonomous" means "independent of particular social relations". The text is a response to the criticisms of J. Cohen, Levine and Wright.
Biological determinism, also known as genetic determinism, [1] is the belief that human behaviour is directly controlled by an individual's genes or some component of their physiology, generally at the expense of the role of the environment, whether in embryonic development or in learning. [2]