Content area
Abstract
Natural-kind essentialism is the view that the physical world is populated by objects belonging to distinct natural kinds, kinds whose essences function as the criteria for kind-membership and provide the intrinsic grounds for the behaviour of their individual members. A prominent school of thought in recent metaphysics and philosophy of science, it nevertheless faces a number of challenges. My principal aim in this dissertation is to rectify this state of affairs, placing the theory on firmer ground and clarifying some of its central tenets.
The work is divided up topically, with chapters two and three addressing some worries for the essentialist ontology of kinds, while chapters four and five deal with laws, and chapter six with biological taxa: Chatper (2) "Natural Kinds and the Problem of Complex Essences". Here I attempt to address the question of how it is that an instantiated kind-essence can be unified while also consisting at least in part of inherently separable properties. What exactly accounts for the unity of a kind-essence? Chapter (3) "Property Primitivism and the Reducibility of Natural Kinds". This section deals with the question of whether 'natural kind' is a required and irreducible category in ontology, or if instead what we think of as kinds are really just aggregates of properties. Chapter (4) "Complex Essences and the Ontology of Laws". I attempt to defend the essentialist view of laws, making use of some of the points raised in chapter two concerning the complexity of essences. More specifically, I argue that there are certain objections faced both by essentialism and by a major rival, the Dretske-Tooley-Armstrong (DTA) theory of laws, and that essentialism can be shown to address these objections more effectively. Chapter (5) "Does Essentialism Allow for Nomic Realism?" I review the conflicting answers to this question and conclude that essentialists can maintain that laws are a real ingredient in ontology, but that doing so requires making some additions to the standard essentialist catalogue of beings. Chapter (6) "In Defense of Biological Essentialism" I turn my attention to the question of whether species have kind-essences consisting at least in part of intrinsic properties.
