Devitt’s Promiscuous Essentialism
Devitt’s Promiscuous Essentialism

Summary/Abstract: In this paper I examine Michael Devitt’s version of essentialism, a view that stirred a lot of debate amongst philosophers of biology by going against the mainstream view of “death of essentialism” in evolutionary biology. So far, much more attention was directed to refuting Devitt’s view then to analyzing what his essentialism consists in. I go through the main tenets of the essentialist view, examine the relation between Devitt’s view and the so-called traditional essentialism, and the cluster approaches to natural kinds. I conclude that Devitt holds a very flexible variety of pluralistic essentialism, that I term promiscuous essentialism. The benefit of holding such a view is that it can encompass a wide range of categories, but its downside is that knowing the essence of a kind can be minimally explanatory. For this reason, the criterion for privileging certain kinds cannot follow from identifying their essence, which was originally one of the main motivations for holding an essentialist view.

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