[lit-ideas] Re: What is information?
- From: Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 12:22:40 -0400
Joerg asks, "what is essentialism ? "
It's a philosophical malady, a doozy apparently, and one
Donal sometimes accuses me of spreading when I type out what
are laughingly considered my thoughts on aesthetics. Hence
the Popperian "Worlds" that Donal adduces to examine
different kinds of information, although that may just be
his overly obstinate attempt to think clearly.
Here's Wiki:
In philosophy, essentialism is the view, that, for any
specific kind of entity it is at least theoretically
possible to specify a finite list of characteristics —all of
which any entity must have to belong to the group defined.
This view is contrasted with non-essentialism which states
that for any given entity there are no specified traits
which that entity must have to to be defined as that entity.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Essentialism
And here's the paradoxical critique of anti-essentialism in
postcolonial studies:
As Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, the editors of The
Spivak Reader (1996), put it, one "cannot simply assert, 'I
will be anti-essentialist' and make that stick, for you
cannot not be an essentialist to some degree. The critique
of essentialism is predicated upon essentialism"
http://www.english.emory.edu/Bahri/Essentialism.html
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