Journal articles on the topic 'Essentialism'
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Narayan, Uma. "Essence of Culture and a Sense of History: A Feminist Critique of Cultural Essentialism." Hypatia 13, no. 2 (1998): 86–106. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1998.tb01227.x.
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Drawing parallels between gender essentialism and cultural essentialism, I point to some common features of essentialist pictures of culture. 1 argue that cultural essentialism is detrimental to feminist agendas and suggest strategies for its avoidance, Contending that some forms of cultural relativism buy into essentialist notions of culture, I argue that postcolonial feminists need to be cautious about essentialist contrasts between “Western” and “Third World” cultures.
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Lewicka, Maria. "Essentialism in Environmental Psychology: Controversies and Evidence." Roczniki Psychologiczne 24, no. 3-4 (October 13, 2021): 361–82. http://dx.doi.org/10.18290/rpsych21242-2s.
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This paper deals with the issue of psychological essentialism as present in environmental studies. The essentialist belief—that is, the assumption that things have a deep essence that defines their stable identity—has been a recurring theme in environmental psychology. In this paper, I show its relevance for such research areas as environmental perception and the concept of place as a meaningful location. I show that essentialism underlies early phenomenological theories of place and is present in contemporary biophilic theories of environmental perception. I discuss relevant theories and present research findings that justify the claim that people are psychological essentialists when dealing with the physical built environment.
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Yao, Donna J., Melody M. Chao, and Angela K. y. Leung. "When Essentialism Facilitates Intergroup Conflict Resolution: The Positive Role of Perspective-Taking." Journal of Cross-Cultural Psychology 50, no. 4 (March 8, 2019): 483–507. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/0022022119835058.
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Essentialism, a fundamental belief of the fixedness of social group essences, is often associated with negative intergroup outcomes. However, research is yet to explore the role of essentialism in intergroup conflicts, despite their prevalence. To address this gap, we conducted the first direct examination on how essentialism influences conflict management toward out-group members. Moreover, we examined perspective-taking as a positive factor in improving conflict management among essentialist individuals relative to their non-essentialist counterparts in intergroup contexts. Results across three experiments provided little support to the negative effect of essentialism on intergroup (vs. intragroup) conflict management. Yet, we found that perspective-taking promoted the use of problem solving and improved one’s own gain and the dyad’s joint gain among essentialist individuals, but not non-essentialist individuals, in intergroup (vs. intragroup) conflict situations. This research suggests that when coupled with perspective-taking, essentialism can promote constructive conflict resolution in intergroup contexts.
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Mandalaywala, Tara M., David M. Amodio, and Marjorie Rhodes. "Essentialism Promotes Racial Prejudice by Increasing Endorsement of Social Hierarchies." Social Psychological and Personality Science 9, no. 4 (June 19, 2017): 461–69. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1948550617707020.
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Why do essentialist beliefs promote prejudice? We proposed that essentialist beliefs increase prejudice toward Black people because they imply that existing social hierarchies reflect a naturally occurring structure. We tested this hypothesis in three studies ( N = 621). Study 1 revealed that racial essentialism was associated with increased prejudice toward Blacks among both White and Black adult participants, suggesting that essentialism relates to prejudice according to social hierarchy rather than only to group membership. Studies 2 and 3 experimentally demonstrated that increasing essentialist beliefs induced stronger endorsement of social hierarchies in both Black and White participants, which in turn mediated the effect of essentialism on negative attitudes toward Black people. Together, these findings suggest that essentialism increases prejudice toward low-status groups by increasing endorsement of social hierarchies and existing inequality.
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Hussein, Jeylan Wolyie. "Examining the nature of defensively situated politics of difference, identity and essentialism in Ethiopia: A critical engagement." International Area Studies Review 19, no. 4 (September 16, 2016): 340–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/2233865916666763.
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The paper presents an analysis of and challenges to various dimensions of defensively situated essentialisms about nation, people and identities in Ethiopia, examining the political, social and ideological underpinnings of essentialist perceptions and assessing their limitations. The author’s central argument is that limitations in essentialist positions and perspectives held about the meaning of nation, state and ethnic identity can be improved if a more context-sensitive and critical approach is adopted. The paper concludes with suggestions on what can and should be done to prevent essentialism and other totalizing logics from extending into the matrix of intellectual analyses of identities.
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Zachar, Peter. "The Psychological Construction of Emotion – A Non-Essentialist Philosophy of Science." Emotion Review 14, no. 1 (November 24, 2021): 3–14. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/17540739211058715.
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Advocates for the psychological construction of emotion view themselves as articulating a non-essentialist alternative to basic emotion theory's essentialist notion of affect programs. Psychological constructionists have also argued that holding essentialist assumptions about emotions engenders misconceptions about the psychological constructionist viewpoint. If so, it is important to understand what psychological constructionists mean by “essentialism” and “non-essentialism.” To advance the debate, I take a deeper dive into non-essentialism, comparing the non-essentialist views of the early empiricists with those of the psychological constructionists, focusing on the theories of James Russell and Lisa Barrett. Using Lakatos’ notion of scientific research programs, I also describe how Russell's and Barrett's views have evolved into different and potentially competing research programs under the psychological constructionist banner.
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Rocca, Michael Della. "Essentialists and Essentialism." Journal of Philosophy 93, no. 4 (1996): 186–202. http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/2940887.
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Haslam, Nick. "The essence of essentialism?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37, no. 5 (October 2014): 491–92. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x13003750.
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AbstractAs an account of the cognitive processes that support psychological essentialism, the inherence heuristic clarifies the basis of individual differences in essentialist thinking, and how they are associated with prejudice. It also illuminates the contextual variability of social essentialism, and where its conceptual boundaries should be drawn.
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Fuss, Diana J. "“Essentially Speaking”: Luce Irigaray's Language of Essence." Hypatia 3, no. 3 (1988): 62–80. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1988.tb00189.x.
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Luce Irigaray's fearlessness towards speaking the body has earned for her work the dismissive label “essentialist.” But Irigaray's Speculum de l'autre femme and Ce Sexe qui n'en est pas un suggest that essence may not be the unitary, monolithic, in short, essentialist category that anti-essentialists so often presume it to be. Irigaray strategically deploys essentialism for at least two reasons: first, to reverse and to displace Jacques Lacan's phallomorphism; and second, to expose the contradiction at the heart of Aristotelian metaphysics which denies women access to “Essence” while at the same time positing the essence of “Woman” precisely as non-essential (as matter).
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Buhagiar, Luke J., Gordon Sammut, Alessia Rochira, and Sergio Salvatore. "There’s no such thing as a good Arab: Cultural essentialism and its functions concerning the integration of Arabs in Europe." Culture & Psychology 24, no. 4 (March 9, 2018): 560–76. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1354067x18763795.
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Concerns about immigration are salient in the European Union and in Malta in particular. Previous research has demonstrated deep antipathy towards the Arab community in Malta, and social representations of Arabs are mired in a conflation of ethnic and religious categories with negative connotations. This paper presents evidence of the potency, within the public sphere, of negative arguments from cultural essentialism, concerning the integration of Arabs in Europe. The data were obtained abductively from a data corpus containing positive, mixed and negative arguments about Arabs and their integration. Results pointed towards the almost total exclusivity of arguments from cultural essentialism. These posited Arabic culture as an underlying essence that makes integration difficult or impossible. Different forms of culturally essentialist views varied in their emphasis of different aspects of cultural essentialism. Reductionist, determinist, delineatory and temporal aspects of cultural essentialism were all emphasised by respondents. The essentialist exceptions to negative arguments from cultural essentialism were rare and were posed tentatively by participants. Their paucity and manner of delivery substantiate the claim that it is strictly an Arabic cultural essence that is deemed to make integration impossible. Findings are discussed in light of the communicative functions that these dominant argumentative strategies fulfil.
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Dennehy, Tara C. "Inherence is an aspect of psychological essentialism." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37, no. 5 (October 2014): 486–87. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x13003695.
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AbstractInherence is not a distinct construct from psychological essentialism; it is one of several underlying beliefs. I propose that inherence is only one entry point to the perception of an essence and posit that context may influence which aspects of essentialist reasoning precede inferring an essence. I also discuss how psychological essentialism can uniquely account for violations of category-based expectancies.
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Wallner, Michael, and Anand Vaidya. "Essence, Explanation, and Modality." Philosophy 95, no. 4 (July 28, 2020): 419–45. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0031819120000200.
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AbstractRecently, Kit Fine's (1994) view that modal truths are true in virtue of, grounded in, or explained by essentialist truths has been under attack. In what follows we offer two responses to the wave of criticism against his view. While the first response is pretty straightforward, the second is based on the distinction between, what we call, Reductive Finean Essentialism and Non-Reductive Finean Essentialism. Engaging the work of Bob Hale on Non-Reductive Finean Essentialism, we aim to show that the arguments against Fine's view are unconvincing, while we acknowledge the presence of a deep standoff between the two views.
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Strevens, Michael. "The causes of characteristic properties: Insides versus categories." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37, no. 5 (October 2014): 502–3. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x13003889.
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AbstractCimpian & Salomon (C&S) propose that the inherence heuristic, a tendency to explain the behavior and other properties of things in terms of their intrinsic characteristics, precedes and explains “essentialist thinking” about natural kinds. This commentary reviews evidence that it is rather essentialism (or something like it) that precedes the assumption of inherence, and suggests that essentialism can do without the inherence heuristic altogether.
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Wilton, Leigh S., Ariana N. Bell, Colleen M. Carpinella, Danielle M. Young, Chanel Meyers, and Rebekah Clapham. "Lay Theories of Gender Influence Support for Women and Transgender People’s Legal Rights." Social Psychological and Personality Science 10, no. 7 (November 14, 2018): 883–94. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1948550618803608.
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Essentialism—the belief that differences between groups of people are biologically based and unchangeable—is strongly associated with prejudice toward a variety of social groups. The present work examines how gender essentialism shapes support for the rights of two marginalized gender groups: women and transgender people. Study 1 provides correlational evidence that endorsement of gender essentialism is a robust predictor of people’s opposition to both women’s and transgender people’s rights, over and above other individual difference measures. Studies 2 and 3 provide evidence that exposure to anti-essentialist messages about gender indirectly increases the support for women’s and transgender people’s rights. Study 4 examines the underlying psychological process, showing that gender essentialism reduction indirectly increases the support for women’s and transgender people’s rights through prejudice. Implications for research on lay theories and transgender people are discussed.
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Kanovsky, Martin. "Essentialism and Folksociology: Ethnicity Again." Journal of Cognition and Culture 7, no. 3-4 (2007): 241–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/156853707x208503.
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AbstractThe aim of this article is to show that empirical evidence suggests that no particular causal process of essence acquisition is constitutive for essentialism in folksociology. Innate potential and biological inheritance, however powerful they may be for the human cognitive mind in the domain of folkbiology, are far from necessary in essentialist folksociological classifications. Essentialism in folksociology is not defined by any particular causal process of essence acquisition. Even when we are able to detect the innateness in a particular folksociology, we should always look for other features of essentialism (inherence, sharp boundaries, immutability of identity, etc.). The article reviews some influential cognitive proposals concerning folksociology (Astuti, Gil-White, Hirschfeld), and provides arguments and empirical evidence collected in Western Ukraine in favour of the claim that the innateness is not the constitutive part of sociology, let alone of psychological essentialism.
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Noyes, Alexander, and Frank C. Keil. "Generics designate kinds but not always essences." Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 116, no. 41 (September 23, 2019): 20354–59. http://dx.doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1900105116.
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People believe that some categories are kinds with reliable causal structure and high inductive potential (e.g., tigers). Widely endorsed theories propose that people are biased to assume kinds are essential, and so naturally determined by internal causal properties. Generic language (e.g., “men like sports”) is 1 mechanism thought to evoke this bias. We propose instead that generics principally designate that categories are kinds. Participants can entertain diverse causal structures in the presence of generics: Hearing that biological properties generalize to a category (e.g., “men grow beards”) prompts participants to infer essential structure, but hearing neutral or social properties (“women are underpaid”) generalized prompts other causal beliefs. Thus, generics induce essentialism only in interaction with cues that reasonably prompt essentialist explanation. We tested our model with adult participants (n = 739 total), using measures that disentangle essentialist beliefs from kind beliefs. In study 1, we replicate prior methods with our new measures, and find that generics influence kind beliefs more than essentialism. In study 2, we vary property content (biological vs. cultural properties), and show that generics only increase essentialism when paired with biological properties. In study 3, we show that generics designate kinds but not essentialism when neutral properties are used across animals, tools, and people. In study 4, we show that believing a category is a kind increases the spontaneous production of generic statements, regardless of whether the kind is essential or socially constructed. Generics do not necessitate essentialist beliefs. Participants were flexible in their reasoning about kinds.
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Khodadadi, Hossein. "On Aristotelian Essence." Controvérsia (UNISINOS) - ISSN 1808-5253 19, no. 3 (December 20, 2023): 55–67. http://dx.doi.org/10.4013/con.2023.193.04.
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The concept of essence holds a pivotal role in unraveling Aristotle’s metaphysical framework. In his exploration of Metaphysics, Aristotle delves into the quest for fundamental being, positing that the primary substance is essentially synonymous with essence. This paper examines the criteria for essence, drawing from both the Categories and Metaphysics Z. Two distinct perspectives on essentialism, namely individual essentialism, aligned with the contemporary modal account of essence, and kind essentialism, are scrutinized. Through a critical analysis, this paper contends that both these essentialist accounts fall short in adequately elucidating the Aristotelian concept of essence. Consequently, this pivotal notion, governed by Aristotelian criteria, remains a perplexing enigma, challenging contemporary attempts to fully grasp its intricacies.
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Wheeler, Samuel C. "Quine, Davidson, Relative Essentialism and the Question of Being." Open Philosophy 1, no. 1 (August 25, 2018): 115–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.1515/opphil-2018-0009.
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AbstractRelative essentialism, the view that multiple objects about which there are distinct de re modal truths can occupy the same space at the same time, is a metaphysical view that dissolves a number of metaphysical issues. The present essay constructs and defends relative essentialism and argues that it is implicit in some of the ideas of W. V. Quine and Donald Davidson. Davidson’s published views about individuation and sameness can accommodate the common-sense insights about change and persistence of Aristotle and Kripke. Aristotle and Kripke have to give up unmediated direct reference resting on a unique correct articulation of reality into entities. Davidson has to acknowledge a distinction between descriptions giving accidental and those giving essential features of an object. Quine and Davidson were in a position to be a relative essentialist, but were over-impressed by supervenience. The relative essentialist view of beings developed from Quine and Davidson strongly suggests the Heideggerian distinction between beings and Being, and is the perspective from which analytic philosophy can engage that topic. Relative essentialism also connects analytic philosophy to Derrida’s thinking about differance.
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Fong, Lawrence Hoc Nang, Hongwei He, Melody Manchi Chao, Galli Leandro, and David King. "Cultural essentialism and tailored hotel service for Chinese: the moderating role of satisfaction." International Journal of Contemporary Hospitality Management 31, no. 9 (September 9, 2019): 3610–26. http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/ijchm-11-2018-0910.
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Purpose The purpose of this study is to understand Chinese consumers’ responses to ethnically tailored hotel services from the theoretical perspective of cultural essentialism. Design/methodology/approach Data collection was conducted through an online survey with Chinese respondents. Hierarchical moderated regression was performed to analyze the data. Findings The results show a positive relationship between cultural essentialism and consumer responses to hotel services that are tailored to their culture. Furthermore, the findings show that prior service satisfaction does not only positively influence the consumer responses, but also amplifies the link between cultural essentialism and the consumer responses. Practical implications Hoteliers are recommended to consider the cultural essentialism of Chinese consumers when adaptive services are introduced. Hotel services that are tailored to Chinese culture is a viable strategy if most Chinese customers are cultural essentialists. Originality/value This study adds knowledge to the hospitality scholarship by introducing cultural essentialism and demonstrating its role in influencing consumer preferences for familiarity as opposed to exotic hotel services. Furthermore, the moderating role of service satisfaction extends the consumer behavior literature.
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Grubba, Leilane Serratine, and Valter Moura do Carmo. "ESSENTIALISM AS THE PHILOSOPHICAL FOUNDATION OF AMERICAN CONVENTION OF HUMAN RIGHTS (1969)." Revista da Faculdade Mineira de Direito 26, no. 51 (August 23, 2023): 138–51. http://dx.doi.org/10.5752/p.2318-7999.2023v26n51p138-151.
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The article focuses on the American Convention on Human Rights (ACHR), known as the San José Pact of Costa Rica, because of its political and legal importance for protecting and promoting the Americas' rights. The objective is to analyze the consistency of the theoretical foundation of that human rights document. Therefore, we will first analyze the Convention's text and point out essentialism as the philosophical foundation. Then, we will discuss the essentialist assumption philosophically. Finally, the theoretical problem of essentialism as the foundation of the Convention will be analyzed in light of Sartre's existentialism. From the considerations presented, the philosophical foundation of the rights in the 1969 Convention, essentialism, is not theoretically consistent, despite being an indispensable rhetorical argument.
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Sepetyi, Dmytro. "Anti-kripkean intuitions: conceptualism versus essentialism." Filosofska dumka (Philosophical Thought) -, no. 1 (April 6, 2022): 98–114. http://dx.doi.org/10.15407/fd2022.01.098.
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The article discusses Saul Kripke’s criticisms of the account of the reference of general names he called “descriptivism” and the considerations he advanced in favour of his own essentialist causal-historical account of the reference of natural kind terms. The alternative of conceptualism versus essentialism about the reference of general terms is explained in details. The case is made that most of the intuitions on which Kripke based his arguments are highly controversial, and the main examples he used to explain and support his views (such as examples of whales and fish, water and H20, gold, tigers, and unicorns) do not constitute a clear case for the preference of essentialism over conceptualism. Moreover, these examples can be modified in such ways that in the perspective of these modifications, Kripke’s essentialist construal turns out to be far-fetched and implausible, whereas a form of conceptualism (the cluster theory of reference) is tenable.
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Rakoczy, Hannes, and Trix Cacchione. "The developmental and evolutionary origins of psychological essentialism lie in sortal object individuation." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37, no. 5 (October 2014): 500–501. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x13003865.
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AbstractCimpian & Salomon (C&S) present promising steps towards understanding the cognitive underpinnings of adult essentialism. However, their approach is less convincing regarding ontogenetic and evolutionary aspects. In contrast to C&S's claim, the so-called inherence heuristic, though perhaps vital in adult reasoning, seems an implausible candidate for the developmental and evolutionary foundations of psychological essentialism. A more plausible candidate is kind-based object individuation that already embodies essentialist modes of thinking and that is present in infants and nonhuman primates.
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Xu, Ping. "Irigaray's Mimicry and the Problem of Essentialism." Hypatia 10, no. 4 (1995): 76–89. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1527-2001.1995.tb00999.x.
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This essay deals with the essentialism controversy concerning Luce Irigaray through looking into her strategic use of mimicry, which has not been fully addressed by her critics. The author argues that what appear to be essentialist elements in Irigaray's writings are in fact the “sites” where she is mimicking the phallogocentric discourse in order to uncover its essentialist and “sexed” nature and at the same time to resist being reabsorbed into its reductive order.
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Dobrynin, Din Kh. "On the Theoretical-methodological Consequences of Essentialism in Definition of Religion and Ethnic Community." Voprosy Filosofii, no. 9 (2021): 163–72. http://dx.doi.org/10.21146/0042-8744-2021-9-163-172.
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The article reveals the theoretical-methodological problems of combining essentialist attitudes in the definitions of religion and ethnic community. Essentialism assumes that an ethnic community has an essence that should be reflected in the theoretical constructions of scientists. At the same time, one of the essential features of an ethnic community is supposed to be the presence of a unique culture, including religion. The essentialist understanding of religion is based either on overly narrow or overly broad definitions of it. The author comes to the conclusion that the simultaneous appeal to essentialism in relation to ethnic community and to narrow essentialist definitions of religion (which, for example, does not include Buddhism) leads to the fact that an ethnic community can be spoken of only when its culture includes a pronounced religious component. In essentialism, an ethnic community is defined through a number of essential features, including religion. However, the latter is defined so broadly that it becomes indistinguishable from morality and, consequently, loses its essence. This leads to a methodological impasse – the essence of the phenomenon is revealed through an appeal to the non-essential theoretical construct.
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Prentice, Deborah A., and Dale T. Miller. "Psychological Essentialism of Human Categories." Current Directions in Psychological Science 16, no. 4 (August 2007): 202–6. http://dx.doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-8721.2007.00504.x.
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Psychological essentialism is an ordinary mode of category representation that has powerful social-psychological consequences. This article reviews those consequences, with a focus on the distinctive ways people perceive, evaluate, and interact with members of human categories they essentialize. Why and when people engage in this mode of thinking remain open questions. Variability in essentialism across cultures, categories, and contexts suggests that this mode of representing human categories is rooted in a naturalistic theory of category origins, combined with a need to explain differences that cross category boundaries.
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Franklin, Sarah. "Essentialism, Which Essentialism?" Journal of Homosexuality 24, no. 3-4 (April 21, 1993): 27–40. http://dx.doi.org/10.1300/j082v24n03_02.
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Olivola, Christopher Y., and Edouard Machery. "Is psychological essentialism an inherent feature of human cognition?" Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37, no. 5 (October 2014): 499. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x13003841.
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AbstractRecent evidence shows that psychological essentialism is neither a universal nor stable feature of human cognition. The extent to which people report essentialist intuitions varies enormously across cultures and education levels, and is also influenced by subtle, normatively irrelevant contextual manipulations. These results challenge the notion that the human mind is “fitted” with a built-in inherence heuristic that produces essentialist intuitions.
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O'Connor, Cliodhna, and Helene Joffe. "The social aetiology of essentialist beliefs." Behavioral and Brain Sciences 37, no. 5 (October 2014): 498–99. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0140525x1300383x.
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AbstractThis commentary highlights the importance of attending to the sociocultural contexts that foster essentialist ideas. It contends that Cimpian & Salomon's (C&S's) model undervalues the extent to which the development of essentialist beliefs is contingent on social experience. The result is a restriction of the model's applicability to real-world instances of essentialism-fuelled prejudice and discrimination.
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Bartulović, Marija, and Barbara Kušević. "Is It Time (Yet) to Shelve LGBTIQ Topics? The Contextual Adequacy of (De-)Essentialism as an Educational Strategy." Acta Iadertina 19, no. 2 (March 23, 2023): 169–86. http://dx.doi.org/10.15291/ai.3971.
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The debate on the relationship between queer theory and identity politics, the hitherto dominant research framework with strong application potential, was expanded by establishing queer theory as a starting point for studies examining sexual and gender diversity in education. The point of contention became the question of the purposefulness of strategic essentialism, with a strong emphasis on the many pitfalls of insufficient intersectional understanding of identity, where sexual and gender diversity is but one dimension. Various pitfalls of de essentialism also became the subject of analysis. With such polarities in mind, in this article we present a part of the data collected within a research project aimed at LGBTIQ inclusiveness of educational institutions. The aim of this article is to analyse potential advantages and disadvantages of using a theoretically progressive strategy of de-essentialism in a heteronormative educational context. Data collected in four focus groups conducted with teachers in a number of Zagreb secondary schools show that, in their attitudes and daily educational practices concerning LGBTIQ topics, research participants are positioned at different points of the spectrum, varying from essentialist to de-essentialist, while the exact positioning is strongly determined by context. The concluding part of the article provides guidelines for future research.
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Tabachnick, David Edward. "Heidegger's Essentialist Responses to the Challenge of Technology." Canadian Journal of Political Science 40, no. 2 (June 2007): 487–505. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0008423907070151.
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Abstract.This paper is an effort to defend Heidegger's essentialist philosophy of technology against the charge of determinism. Rather than merely accepting its all-encompassing power, Heidegger provides three responses to the challenge of technology: 1) “aggressive essentialism” or the elimination of technology; 2) “moderate essentialism” or the reform of political, social and cultural institutions to better reflect the changes that technology brings; and 3) “passive essentialism” or the acceptance that we cannot act against or direct technology.Résumé.Dans cet article, l'auteur s'efforce de défendre la philosophie d'essentialisme de technologie proposée par Heidegger contre l'accusation de déterminisme. Plutôt que simplement accepter le pouvoir omniprésent de la technologie, Heidegger fournit trois réponses au défi qu'elle présente: 1) “ l'essentialisme agressif ”, ou l'élimination de la technologie; 2) “ l'essentialisme modéré ”, ou la réforme des institutions politiques, sociales et culturelles pour mieux refléter les changements apportés par la technologie; et 3) “l'essentialisme passif ”, ou l'acceptation du fait que nous ne pouvons ni agir contre la technologie ni la diriger.
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Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, Ellen Rooney, and Soledad Tuñón. "En una palabra. <i>Entrevista</i>. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak con Ellen Rooney." Revista de Estudios Sociales, no. 88 (April 8, 2024): 101–28. http://dx.doi.org/10.7440/res88.2024.06.
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In this interview, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak revisits the debate between essentialism and anti-essentialism by reconsidering various theoretical frameworks she has engaged with over her intellectual journey. These frameworks include deconstruction, Marxism, and feminisms, alongside reflections on the role of philosophy. One key focus of her reflection is the concept of strategic essentialism in understanding social movements, diverging from her previous stances. Spivak suggests viewing it as an ongoing critique of essentialist approaches, emphasizing the importance of maintaining critical, strategic, and indispensable elements within a minimalizable essence. She also stresses the significance of authorial positioning and autobiographical narratives, drawing on childhood lessons. She explores teaching as a practice that can convey the impossibility of fixed essences rather than engaging in theoretical debates. She examines her own place within the Subaltern Studies Group and the political connotations of the “Third World.” Towards the end, she delves into the practical perspective on essences concerning empirical realities and the dynamic between researchers and their audiences.
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Lipourli, Eleni, and Antonis Gardikiotis. "Representations of refugees: Linguistic abstractness and social perceptions." Psychology: the Journal of the Hellenic Psychological Society 28, no. 2 (December 31, 2023): 195–204. http://dx.doi.org/10.12681/psy_hps.31922.
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The paper examines the relationship among stereotype content, essentialism, and preferred language abstraction in refugee media representations. In two studies, participants were asked to choose captions of differential degree of language abstraction (according to the linguistic category model, from descriptive action verbs to adjectives) thought appropriate for an image of refugees, after they first completed a survey on stereotype content (perceived competence and warmth) and essentialist beliefs (Study 2 only) about refugees. In both studies, perceived competence predicted increased language abstraction. In Study 2, competence was also found to mediate the effects of essentialism on language abstraction. These results underline the importance of stereotype content to biased language preference.
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Ilhaam, Saleha. "Reading Identity, Reading Essence: A Strategic Essentialist Approach to Mulk Raj Anand’s Untouchable." South Asian Journal of Social Sciences and Humanities 2, no. 4 (2021): 91–101. http://dx.doi.org/10.48165/sajssh.2021.2406.
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The term strategic essentialism, coined by Spivak, is generally understood as “a political strategy whereby differences (within Group) are temporarily downplayed, and unity assumed for the sake of achieving political goals.” On the other hand, essentialism focuses that everything in this world has an intrinsic and immutable essence of its own. The adaption of a particular “nature” of one group of people by way of sexism, culturalization, and ethnification is strongly linked to the idea of essentialism. Mulk Raj Anand’s Bakha is dictated as an outcast by the institutionalized hierarchy of caste practice. He is essentialized as an untouchable by attributing to him the characteristic of dirt and filth. However, unlike other untouchables, Bakha can apprehend the difference between the cultured and uncultured, dirt and cleanliness. Via an analysis of Anand’s “Untouchable,” the present article aims to bring to the forefront the horrid destruction of the individual self that stems from misrepresentations of personality. Through strategic essentialism, it unravels Bakha’s contrasting nature as opposed to his pariah class, defied by his remarkable inner character and etiquette. The term condemns the essentialist categories of human existence. It has been applied to decontextualize and deconstruct the inaccurately essentialized identity of Bakha, which has made him a part of the group he does not actually belong to.
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Dallavalle, Nancy A. "Neither Idolatry nor Iconoclasm: A Critical Essentialism for Catholic Feminist Theology." Horizons 25, no. 1 (1998): 23–42. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s0360966900030711.
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AbstractFollowing the work of gender theorists who find the terms “male” and “female” to be socially constructed, feminist theology has tended to repudiate essentialism. The position that results is one of agnosticism about biological sexuality, a position that is only reinforced by the essentialist excesses that ground the discussion of the “psycho-physical structure” of women found in official Catholic teaching. This article suggests that the polarity of feminist theology and official Catholic teaching on questions of sex and gender can be overcome by using the framework of a “critical essentialism,” a position that retrieves the Catholic theological tradition of reflection on “male” and “female” while allowing its claims to be appropriately winnowed by the insights of gender theorists.
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Holliday, Adrian, and Malcolm N. Macdonald. "Researching the Intercultural: Intersubjectivity and the Problem with Postpositivism." Applied Linguistics 41, no. 5 (March 6, 2019): 621–39. http://dx.doi.org/10.1093/applin/amz006.
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Abstract In intercultural communication studies, the positivist preoccupation with objectivist, essentialist, solid large cultures has been replaced by a postmodern recognition that the intercultural is liquid and ideologically constructed. However, a postpositivist resistance to this paradigm change, while recognizing the dangers of essentialism, continues to be objectivist and fails to address the intersubjective nature of the ideological construction of culture. This results in a soft essentialism. This methodological failure of postpositivism is driven by a neoliberal technicalized commodification of quantitative and qualitative methods that does not address the subjective implicatedness of researchers. It therefore prevents an understanding of the liquid nature of the intercultural and sustains the neo-racist implications of essentialism. An example of this is commodifying international students as culturally problematic to serve a quantifiable notion of intercultural competence. The methodological flaws of postpositivism can only be avoided by means of an approach to researching cultural groups in which large culture concepts such as nation are viewed as one of many possible, emergent, ideologically constructed variables rather than as the starting point for research.
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Pigalev, Alexander I. "Contextualizing Rosenzweig’s and Levinas’ Notions of the Other by Derrida’s Construal of Difference." RUDN Journal of Philosophy 24, no. 3 (December 15, 2020): 379–97. http://dx.doi.org/10.22363/2313-2302-2020-24-3-379-397.
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The article focuses on juxtaposing the stances of Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas on the notion of the Other based on the metaphysical principles of modernity so as to expose the prerequisites for their attitude to metaphysics in whole. The peculiarity of the proposed approach is the analysis of the notions of the Other in Rosenzweig and Levinas from the perspective of Jacques Derrida’s philosophy. The scrutiny proceeds from the assumption that the national philosophies, having been considered as the specific response to the effects of the encounter of societies to be modernized with the spreading modernity, for that very reason attach great importance to the construal of the Other. It is emphasized that the similarities between the national schools of philosophy indicate correlating the particular with the general as the paradigm for the comprehension of the Other, whereas the Jewish philosophy has previously conceptualized that paradigm by way of the opposition of “Athens and Jerusalem”. In an effort to assess the capabilities of the above-mentioned paradigm the analysis of the relevant range of problems is set into the wider context and they are considered in connection with the transition from essentialism to anti-essentialism that characterizes already the late modernity. It is disclosed that Rosenzweig’s stance was still essentialist, while Levinas tried to abandon the essentialist understanding of the Other, albeit he did not complete the transition to anti-essentialism. Levinas’ break with metaphysics was brought to a close by Derrida whose anti-essentialist stance on identity and difference radically diverges from the thinking that adheres to the “metaphysics of presence”. In the issue, Derrida who does not formally belong to the Jewish philosophy could afford to summarize Rozenzweig’s and Levinas’ approaches to the problem of the Other, and in so doing he makes a contribution to both general and Jewish philosophy.
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McFee, Graham. "What Ever Happened to Anti-Essentialism?" Aesthetic Investigations 2, no. 2 (July 11, 2019): 196–214. http://dx.doi.org/10.58519/aesthinv.v2i2.11968.
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How should one explain the relative disappearance of a major preoccupation of English-speaking Analytical Philosophy in the late 1950s/early 1960s: an anti-essentialist response to the question, ‘What is art?’, typified in papers by Kennick and Weitz? Minimally, anti-essentialism denies the widely-held assumption that something must be in common between all the instances where (in our case) the term “[fine] art” or the concept art is rightly ascribed, in virtue of which all are called ‘art’; a stronger version urges that, in fact, there is no essence to (our example) art.
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Bauer, William A. "Dispositional Essentialism and the Nature of Powerful Properties." Disputatio 5, no. 35 (May 1, 2013): 1–19. http://dx.doi.org/10.2478/disp-2013-0001.
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Abstract Dispositional essentialism maintains that all sparse properties are essentially powerful. Two conceptions of sparse properties appear compatible with dispositional essentialism: sparse properties as pure powers or as powerful qualities. This paper compares the two views, criticizes the powerful qualities view, and then develops a new theory of pure powers, termed Point Theory. This theory neutralizes the main advantage powerful qualities appear to possess over pure powers—explaining the existence of powers during latency periods. The paper discusses the relation between powers and space-time points, whether pure powers need to occupy space, and how to account for the movement of pure powers through space-time. Given Point Theory, dispositional essentialists should maintain that sparse properties are pure powers.
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Null, J. Wesley. "William C. Bagley and the Founding of Essentialism: An Untold Story in American Educational History." Teachers College Record: The Voice of Scholarship in Education 109, no. 4 (April 2007): 1013–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/016146810710900408.
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Background/Context Most people who study the history and philosophy of education have heard of essentialism, but few people know the story behind how, when, and why the movement came to exist. This paper tells this story for the first time. Purpose/Conclusions This essay has three purposes. First, it provides an introduction to the life and career of William Chandler Bagley, a prominent professor of education at Teachers College, Columbia University, from 1917 until his retirement in 1939. Following an introduction to Bagley's life, this work describes the founding of essentialism by drawing upon numerous primary and secondary sources to place this movement within the social and historical context in which it developed. The author pays careful attention to the story of how and why the founding of essentialism took place on the same day that John Dewey delivered his “Experience and Education” lecture at the 12th biennial convocation of Kappa Delta Pi. The paper then argues that what came to be known as essentialism represents a forgotten tradition in American educational history, one that is much richer than contemporary calls for “standards and accountability,” which grew out of the economically driven “A Nation at Risk” report of 1983. To conclude, the essay calls for more substantive attention to liberal education, purpose, moral philosophy, and curriculum for teaching teachers, all of which were at the heart of essentialist educational thought, but are now forgotten in an age obsessed with economic efficiency. The author calls upon contemporary leaders in American education to reconsider essentialism as a powerful philosophy that has great potential for the future of the teaching profession. Research Design This paper is written from the perspective of history and is based upon the long-established methodology from the field of historiography.
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Messner, Michael. "Gender Ideologies, Youth Sports, and the Production of Soft Essentialism." Sociology of Sport Journal 28, no. 2 (June 2011): 151–70. http://dx.doi.org/10.1123/ssj.28.2.151.
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By the mid-Twentieth Century in the U.S., a dominant ideology of natural, categorical differences between women and men was an organic part of the unequal distribution of women and men into domestic and public realms, especially in middle class families. Sport was a key site for the naturalization of this ideology, which I call “hard essentialism.” Since the 1970s, an explosion of female athletic participation mirrored the movement of women into the professions, leading scholars to examine sport as a terrain of contested gender relations. This paper extends that discussion by positing a four-part periodization of hegemonic and counter-hegemonic gender ideologies, stretching from the mid-Twentieth Century to the present. Touching down empirically on contemporary professional class youth sports coaches’ views of children and gender, I identify an ascendant gender ideology I call “soft essentialism.” I argue that youth sports has become a key site for the construction of soft essentialist narratives that appropriate the liberal feminist language of “choice” for girls, but not for boys, thus serving to recreate and naturalize class-based gender asymmetries and inequalities. I end by outlining emergent strategies that spring from the contradictions of soft essentialism.
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van Gerven, Dylan J. J., Anne M. Land-Zandstra, and Welmoet Damsma. "From Hitler’s Sweater to Dinosaur Fossils: An Essentialist Outlook on Authenticity." Review of General Psychology 23, no. 3 (July 15, 2019): 371–81. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1089268019858276.
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Over the past two decades, the concept of authenticity has been the subject of considerable disagreement and debate. Although there have been attempts at reconciling various existing approaches, the literature is still short on a definition that is both practical and precise. This article proposes to make significant headway to that effect by suggesting that authenticity can be accounted for by an underlying psychological phenomenon known as essentialism. In making our case, we first provide an overview of present-day objectivist and constructivist positions and point out their shortcomings, after which we introduce an essentialist account of authenticity. We then argue essentialism has profound benefits over contemporary views and might be the best overarching framework we have, if we intend to reach consensus on the meaning of authenticity.
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Moser, Paul K. "Essentialism." American Catholic Philosophical Quarterly 66, no. 1 (1992): 108–11. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/acpq199266151.
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Yzerbyt, Vincent, Olivier Corneille, and Claudia Estrada. "The Interplay of Subjective Essentialism and Entitativity in the Formation of Stereotypes." Personality and Social Psychology Review 5, no. 2 (May 2001): 141–55. http://dx.doi.org/10.1207/s15327957pspr0502_5.
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In line with our subjective essentialist view of stereotypes (Yzerbyt, Rocher, & Schadron, 1997), we propose that two classes of factors that mutually reinforce each other influence the perception of groups. The perception of a strong level of similarity and organization among group members (i.e., group entitativity) suggests the existence of a deep essence that would account for the detected regularities. Conversely, the existence of naïve theories regarding the presence of an underlying core encourages the search for resemblances and connections within the group. After a short presentation of the recent literature dealing with the concepts of entitativity and essentialism, we review a series of studies from our laboratory showing the impact of entitativity on essentialism as well as the influence of essentialism on entitativity. We also provide empirical evidence for this bidirectional process from both the outsider and the insider perspective. Finally, we examine the potential role of cultural differences both in the ascription of a fundamental nature to an entitative assembly of people and in the use of a priori naïve theories to create surface similarity among group members. As a set, these efforts point to the importance of taking into account the constant dialogue between perceiver's theory-based explanations and group member's perceptual characteristics if one wishes to understand group stereotypes.
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Ohayon, Isabelle, and Julien Thorez. "For a critical and dispassionate constructivism: revisiting the concept of the ‘Global East’ in its relevance to Central Asia." Sotsiologicheskoe Obozrenie / Russian Sociological Review 22, no. 1 (2023): 48–60. http://dx.doi.org/10.17323/1728-192x-2023-1-48-60.
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This article discusses A. Chokobayeva and N. Shelekpayev’s critique of Müller’s concept of the ‘Global East’ to describe the former socialist East, as well as their proposal to adopt a ‘tactical essentialism of national discourses’, which they consider necessary for the production of social science research in Central Asia, liberated from Russian interpretations of the past and present. Consequently, the article discusses the limitations of major paradigms, including that of the “Global East”. It argues that this term ignores the fact that the scholarly field it is supposed to unite is divided by a post-colonial configuration that fosters divergent views. Furthermore, it highlights that this notion also neglects the crucial issue of research autonomy from political affairs. Finally, the article critiques the use of tactical essentialism as a response to these issues. However, the promotion of essentialism — be it tactical or strategic — in Central Asian studies, despite its laudable ambition to move away from imperial and neo-imperial narratives, can exacerbate organic, essentialist and nationalist visions of identity and nation already prevalent in political powers and public opinion. Therefore, the authors argue for a methodological postulate of critical and dispassionate constructivism that guarantees as much autonomy as possible for research in and on Central Asia.
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Nencha, Cristina. "Is L.A. Paul’s Essentialism Really Deeper than Lewis’s?" European journal of analytic philosophy 20, no. 1 (March 14, 2024): 31–54. http://dx.doi.org/10.31820/ejap.20.1.2.
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L.A. Paul calls “deep” the kind of essentialism according to which the essential properties of objects are determined independently of the context. Deep essentialism opposes “shallow essentialism”, of which David Lewis is said to be a prominent advocate. Paul argues that standard forms of deep essentialism face a range of issues (mainly based on an interpretation of Quinean skepticism) that shallow essentialism does not. However, Paul claims, shallow essentialism eliminates the very heart of what motivates essentialism, so it is better to be deep than shallow. Accordingly, she proposes a very sharp novel account of essentialism, which, while attempting to preserve some of the advantages of shallow essentialism over the classical forms of deep essentialism, can be deemed to be deep.In this paper, I compare Paul’s proposal for a kind of deep essentialism with Lewis’s account, as it is presented by Paul. My aim is to show that the differences between the two approaches are not as significant as Paul takes them to be, and that Paul’s account can be taken to be deeper than Lewis’s only at the cost of sacrificing the very idea at the bottom of deep essentialism.This might be taken to suggest that, if Paul is correct in asserting that shallow essentialism is better equipped to address some skeptical challenges, but it is generally preferable to be deep than shallow, then Lewis’s account should be re-evaluated, since, as shallow as it can be, it might be deeper than it looks.
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Maiden, Brett. "Psychological Essentialism in Serek ha-Yaḥad and the Two Spirits Treatise." Dead Sea Discoveries 25, no. 1 (May 25, 2018): 39–56. http://dx.doi.org/10.1163/15685179-12341450.
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Abstract This paper investigates the psychological mechanisms that underpin Qumran sectarian dualism and its construction of in-group/out-group boundaries. Specifically, evidence from experimental and developmental psychology and cognitive anthropology is used to argue that Serek ha-Yaḥad and the Two Spirits Treatise (1QS 3:13–4:26) reflect a deeply-engrained psychological essentialism wherein non-group members are conceptualized as having inherently different biological essences. This essentialist tendency is easily extended to the social domain in what scholars call the “naturalization” of social groups. After reviewing this literature, the paper examines the Serek and Treatise’s use of kinship terms, the word “spirit,” and language denoting human nature and living species, in order to demonstrate that essentialist intuitions about outsiders provide a foundation for the sect’s dualistic worldview. Importantly, the essentialist thinking in these texts is also firmly grounded in and channeled through the intertextual interpretation of scripture, drawing heavily on the rich creation vocabulary in Genesis 1–3.
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Stone, Alison. "Essentialism and Anti-Essentialism in Feminist Philosophy." Journal of Moral Philosophy 1, no. 2 (2004): 135–53. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/174046810400100202.
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AbstractThis article revisits the ethical and political questions raised by feminist debates over essentialism, the belief that there are properties essential to women and which all women share. Feminists’ widespread rejection of essentialism has threatened to undermine feminist politics. Re-evaluating two responses to this problem—‘strategic’ essentialism and Iris Marion Young’s idea that women are an internally diverse ‘series’—I argue that both unsatisfactorily retain essentialism as a descriptive claim about the social reality of women’s lives. I argue instead that women have a ‘ genealogy’: women always acquire femininity by appropriating and reworking existing cultural interpretations of femininity, so that all women become situated within a history of overlapping chains of interpretation. Because all women are located within this complex history, they are identifiable as belonging to a determinate social group, despite sharing no common understanding or experience of femininity. The idea that women have a genealogy thus reconciles anti-essentialism with feminist politics.
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Wu, Megan. "In Defense of Platonic Essentialism About Numbers." Stance: an international undergraduate philosophy journal 14, no. 1 (April 6, 2021): 103–13. http://dx.doi.org/10.33043/s.14.1.103-113.
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In defense of anti-essentialism, pragmatist Richard Rorty holds that we may think of all objects as if they were numbers. I find that Rorty’s metaphysics hinges on two rather weak arguments against the essences of numbers. In contrast, Plato’s metaphysics offers a plausible definition of essentiality by which numbers do have essential properties. Further, I argue that Rorty’s argumentative mistake is mischaracterizing Plato’s definition. I conclude that Plato’s definition of “essential” is a robust one which implies that many properties, beyond those we might intuitively think of, can count as essential properties of objects.
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Wu, Megan. "In Defense of Platonic Essentialism about Numbers." Stance: An International Undergraduate Philosophy Journal 14 (2021): 102–12. http://dx.doi.org/10.5840/stance2021148.
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In defense of anti-essentialism, pragmatist Richard Rorty holds that we may think of all objects as if they were numbers. I find that Rorty’s metaphysics hinges on two rather weak arguments against the essences of numbers. In contrast, Plato’s metaphysics offers a plausible definition of essentiality by which numbers do have essential properties. Further, I argue that Rorty’s argumentative mistake is mischaracterizing Plato’s definition. I conclude that Plato’s definition of “essential” is a robust one which implies that many properties, beyond those we might intuitively think of, can count as essential properties of objects.
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Barnett, Michael, and Ayşe Zarakol. "Global international relations and the essentialism trap." International Theory 15, no. 3 (November 2023): 428–44. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1752971923000131.
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AbstractGlobal IR is an encompassing term for a range of work that has set out to globalize the discipline in terms of its core concepts, assumptions, and substantive areas of study. Our symposium supports Global IR's goals but also offers some friendly critiques of the project with the aim of increasing its impact and durability. In this Introduction to the symposium, we posit that Global IR is vulnerable to a dynamic that limits its capacity to upend the status quo, which we term the ‘essentialism trap’. Essentialism captures a range of commitments oriented around the notion that the world is constituted by pre-formed, fixed, internally coherent, and bounded social forms. The trap involves the overuse of essentialist categories by radical projects, a process that can result in the reinforcement of status quo categories and assumptions. With reference to previous openings in IR that have succumbed to this trap, we identify the dynamics that lead to this trap and suggest ways in which Global IR can avoid it by leaning more into relationalism and global history, and, thereby, fulfil the promise contained in the range of movements it speaks with and for.