[lit-ideas] Re: What is information?
- From: wokshevs@xxxxxx
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx, Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 25 Sep 2006 16:08:38 -0230
Quoting Eric Yost <eyost1132@xxxxxxxxxxxxx>:
> 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
>
W: Regarding the last sentence: But isn't that property one that is being
claimed to be essentially shared by all entities? The claim identifies a
property all entities have in common: all entities exhibit the property of
having no traits necessary for their being the entities they are.
And if the denial of a claim itself presupposes the truth or necessity of the
claim being denied, doesn't this say something about the denial of the claim?
Perhaps language and/or reason thinks us more than we think it/them (to borrow
and turn a remark by Martin).
Walter C. Okshevsky
Memorial U.
> 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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