[lit-ideas] Re: What is information?
- From: Robert Paul <rpaul@xxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Sun, 24 Sep 2006 12:00:41 -0700
Eric, replying to Joerg, quotes 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 âall 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.
Whoever wrote this makes heavy weather out of the notion that things must
have
(essential) properties, without which they would not be the kinds of
things they
are, even though they may have many other properties which do not distinguish
them from other sorts of things. Dogs have the essential property of belonging
to the family canidae and the accidental property of being able to catch
frisbees. Triangles are essentially three-sided, but being scalene is not an
essential property of triangles. Etc. As for what is here called
'non-essentialism,' one would like an example of a thing's being defined in
such a way that none of the properties attributed to it distinguish it in any
way from anything else.
I should add that I (mostly) agree with what Donal on this subject the other
day, and have been lazily thinking about saying so in more detail.
Robert Paul
Reed College
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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