Fwd: NDPR Michael Devitt Biological Essentialism

[Doug Mounce]

Often, when I read current philosophical studies, I find scholars introducing new terminology to characterize their insight with the new term essentially (pun intended) meaning what has been previously understood.  I appreciate when scholars recognize and give credit if they are advancing an idea, or if they simply use the same terminology.  This one on essence in biological category scheming was enjoyed in that regard.

Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews

2025.08.3 View this Review Online   View Other NDPR Reviews

Michael Devitt, Biological Essentialism, Oxford University Press, 2023, 242pp., $100.00 (hbk) ISBN 9780198840282.

Reviewed by Marshall Abrams, University of Alabama at Birmingham

Prior to the introduction of Darwinian and Mendelian ideas and their later integration in the early 20th Century, it was common to view organisms as having essences: intrinsic characters shared by each member of a species, which was distinct from all other species. Darwin and later evolutionary thinkers undermined these ideas. Members of a species—whose boundaries may be indefinite—often exhibit wide variation in phenotypic traits and in underlying genetic and other determinants of phenotypes (for brevity I’ll refer, misleadingly, to any such factors as “genetic”). Because of this variability, many biologists and philosophers have come to think that members of...

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