Suchergebnisse

A critical analysis of Diana Fuss's Essentially Speaking: Feminism, Nature, and Difference (1989a) and Elizabeth Grosz's Sexual Subversions: Three French Feminists (1989).

AbstractDispositional Essentialism, as commonly conceived, consists in the claims that at least some of the fundamental properties essentially confer certain causal-nomological roles on their bearers, and that these properties give rise to the natural modalities. As such, the view is generally taken to be committed to a realist conception of properties as either universals or tropes, and to be thus incompatible with nominalism as understood in the strict sense. Pace this common assumption of the ontological import of Dispositional Essentialism, the aim of this paper is to explore a nominalist version of the view, Austere Nominalist Dispositional Essentialism. The core features of the proposed account are that it eschews all kinds of properties (be they universals, tropes, or sets of particulars), takes certain predicative truths as fundamental, and employs the so-called generic notion of essence. As I will argue, the account is significantly closer to the core idea behind Dispositional Essentialism than the only nominalist account in the vicinity of Dispositional Essentialism that has been offered so far—Ann Whittle's (2009) Causal Nominalism—and is immune to crucial problems that affect this view.

Smith asserts that reviews of gender issues in politics inevitably collide with essentialist categorization & mobilization. Explanation of essentialism follows examples of its use by Robert Dole & Helen Caldicott. The practice is criticized for producing or backing views that may be overly simplistic, antiintellectual, or muddy. There are arguments against pigeonholing, rigidity, & lack of room for ambiguity or evolution in studies of human identity & behavior. Citations of theories backing or refuting essentialism are included. The lure of single identities is discussed, with Lord's "mythical norm" opinion given. Two components of essentialist politics' appeal & use are identified. Exceptions to simplistic delineation of male & female wartime roles & identities are considered. A listing of errors in essentialist discourse precedes warnings of deleterious impacts. Other philosophical approaches are advocated. M. C. Leary

Affective polarization, the phenomenon of liberals and conservatives treating each other as disliked outgroups, is increasingly intense (Iyengar & Westwood, 2015; Pew, 2016). In the present research, I used the construct of psychological essentialism (Medin & Ortony, 1989) to help understand this intergroup phenomenon. Specifically, I measured political essentialism, or the belief that political ideologies are strongly determined, informative, discrete and/or immutable, and tested the relationship between these beliefs and affective polarization. I approached this question with both correlational and experimental methods. In a correlational study, political essentialism overall is found to covary positively with affective polarization and social avoidance of political outgroups. Essentialism is found to be most predictive when treated as a collection of distinct lay beliefs, rather than a unitary construct. Informativeness and discreteness beliefs correspond strongly and positively with affective polarization, while biological basis beliefs and social deterministic beliefs have weak effects in the opposite direction. In the experimental study, manipulating essentialism beliefs had no effect on affective polarization or desire for social distance. Potential reasons for the discrepant results are explored. In sum, this research supports the hypothesis that political essentialism is associated with affective polarization, but does not provide evidence that essentialism plays a causal role in this relationship.

Explores feminism's recent self-critique as an essentialist, universalist project that defines the female subject in specific class, race, & other terms & is thus exclusionary & often wrong. Several variants of this critique are reviewed, & it is argued that a flawed conflation of essentialism & universalism is at their center. Essentialism & universalism form a dichotomy that feminism can step past by accepting gender as a universal category/principle around which the division of labor & various forms of exclusion are decided. Although gender asymmetry varies in form both culturally & historically (a fact that feminism may have neglected), its existence is universal. It is concluded that feminism can acknowledge the particularity of women without losing sight of the fact that men retain the majority of sociopolitical power, & globalization-related benefits & disadvantages will be allocated largely by gender. E. Blackwell

"Homomonadology" outlines the emergence and elaboration of Leo Bersani's onto-ethics/aesthetics over the past half a century, focusing particularly on his interest in the shared references to Leibnizian metaphysics in twentieth-century philosophical and literary texts. The essay begins by detailing Bersani's early engagement, in Balzac to Beckett: Center and Circumference in French Fiction (1970), with Marcel Proust and Samuel Beckett, as well as Gilles Deleuze's and Maurice Blanchot's commentaries on the two writers. Having borrowed Deleuze's description of Proust as a "Leibnizian," Bersani moves from the Proustian to the Beckettian text, organizing his reading in such later texts as Arts of Impoverishment (1993, cowritten with Ulysse Dutoit) around Beckett's allusions to monadology. "Homomonadology" argues that the concept of the Leibnizian monad allows Bersani to articulate an onto-ethics of singularity and correspondences, of nonrelatedness and unity, in a way that comes to inform his post-1980s work on queer theory and queer ethics. It is Bersani's commitment to ontology that renders his work, despite its influence on a number of fields, something of an anomaly in the contemporary critical field. With his varied sources—Deleuze, Proust, and Beckett among the most important—Bersani becomes, as he puts it in an interview, "an essentialist villain" in scholarly fields often driven by constructivist, antiessentialist imperatives.