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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
Winsor, Ron Amundson and Staffan Müller-Wille have each argued that in fact the usual suspects (such as Linnaeus and the Ideal Morphologists) were very far from being essentialists, and that the so-called "essentialism story" (or "myth") in biology is a result of conflating the views expressed and biological examples used by philosophers going ...
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 ...
Given the general observation that powerful groups display heavy reliance on these ideas of natural subordination, many liberationist thinkers have concluded that this essentialism would be a prime rhetorical vehicle to subvert. Thus, the deconstruction of role theory and functionalism within sociology was a central theme from the 1960s onward ...
Gender essentialism is a metaphysical theory which attributes distinct, intrinsic qualities to women and men. [1] [2] Based in essentialism, it holds that there are certain universal, innate, biologically (or psychologically) based features of gender that are at the root of many of the group differences observed in the behavior of men and women.
The new essentialism is a comprehensive philosophy of nature. Philosophers around the world, including Sydney Shoemaker, Charles Martin, George Molnar, George Bealer, John Bigelow, Caroline Lierse, Evan Fales, Crawford Elder, Nicholas Maxwell, Nancy Cartwright , Roy Bhaskar and John Heil, have contributed to in various ways to its development.
Sociologist Joan Acker, analyzing the concept of patriarchy and the role that it has played in the development of feminist thought, says that seeing patriarchy as a "universal, trans-historical and trans-cultural phenomenon" where "women were everywhere oppressed by men in more or less the same ways […] tended toward a biological essentialism."