In philosophy, essentialism is the view that, for any specific kind of entity, there is a set of characteristics or properties all of which any entity of that kind must possess. Therefore all things can be precisely defined or described. In this view, it follows that terms or words should have a single definition and meaning.

In simple terms, essentialism is a generalization stating that certain properties possessed by a group (e.g. people, things, ideas) are universal, and not dependent on context. For example, the essentialist statement 'all human beings are mortal'.

According to essentialism, a member of a specific group may possess other characteristics that are neither needed to establish its membership nor preclude its membership, but that essences do not simply reflect ways of grouping objects; they also result in properties of the object, as the object can be subjugated to smaller contexts.

Anthropology professor Lawrence Hirschfeld gives an example of what constitutes the ''essence'' of a tiger, regardless of whether it is striped or albino, or has lost a leg. The ''essential'' properties of a tiger are those without which it is no longer a tiger. Other properties, such as stripes or number of legs, are considered ''inessential'' or 'accidental'. Biologist Ernest Mayr epitomizes the effect of such an essentialist character of Platonic forms in biology: "Flesh-and-blood rabbits may vary, but their variations are always to be seen as flawed deviation from the ideal essence of rabbit". For Mayr, the healthful antithesis of essentialism in biology is "population thinking".

This view is contrasted with non-essentialism, which states that, for any given kind of entity, there are no specific traits which entities of that kind must possess.

Essentialism came under scrutiny and criticism in the mid to late 20th century by the American pragmatist Richard Rorty. Discussion of its possible limitations has taken place among social scientists and biologists as well.

In philosophy

An ''essence'' characterizes a substance or a form, in the sense of the Forms or Ideas in Platonic idealism. It is permanent, unalterable, and eternal; and present in every possible world. Classical humanism has an essentialist conception of the human being, which means that it believes in an eternal and unchangeable human nature. This viewpoint has been criticized by Marx and Sartre, while assumed by many other existential thinkers. Søren Kirkegaard clearly thought about individuality in essentialist terms and so did Martin Heidegger.

In Plato's philosophy (in particular, the ''Timaeus'' and the ''Philebus''), things were said to come into being in this world by the action of a demiurge who works to form chaos into ordered entities. From Aristotle onward the definition, in philosophical contexts, of the word "essence" is very close to the definition of form (Gr. ''morphe''). Many definitions of essence hearken back to the ancient Greek hylomorphic understanding of the formation of the things of this world. According to that account, the structure and real existence of any thing can be understood by analogy to an artifact produced by a craftsman. The craftsman requires ''hyle'' (timber or wood) and a model, plan or idea in his own mind according to which the wood is worked to give it the indicated contour or form (''morphe''). Aristotle was the first to use the terms ''hyle'' and ''morphe''. According to his explanation, all entities have two aspects, "matter" and "form". It is the particular form imposed that gives some matter its identity, its quiddity or "whatness" (i.e., its "what it is").

Plato was one of the first essentialists, believing in the concept of ideal forms, an abstract entity of which individual objects are mere facsimilies. To give an example; the ideal form of a circle is a perfect circle, something that is physically impossible to make manifest, yet the circles that we draw and observe clearly have some ''idea'' in common — this idea is the ideal form. Plato believed that these ideas are eternal and vastly superior to their manifestations in the world, and that we understand these manifestations in the material world by comparing and relating them to their respective ideal form. Plato's forms are regarded as patriarchs to essentialist dogma simply because they are a case of what is intrinsic and a-contextual of objects — the abstract properties that makes them what they are. For more on forms, read Plato's parable of the cave.

Karl Popper splits the ambiguous term ''realism'' into ''essentialism'' and ''realism''. He uses ''essentialism'' whenever he means the opposite of nominalism, and ''realism'' only as opposed to idealism. Popper himself is a realist as opposed to an idealist, but a methodological nominalist as opposed to an essentialist. For example, statements like "a puppy is a young dog" should be read from right to left, as an answer to "What shall we call a young dog"; never from left to right as an answer to "What is a puppy?"

Metaphysical essentialism

Essentialism, in its broadest sense, is any philosophy that acknowledges the primacy of Essence. Unlike Existentialism, which posits "being" as the fundamental reality, the essentialist ontology must be approached from a metaphysical perspective. Empirical knowledge is developed from experience of a relational universe whose components and attributes are defined and measured in terms of intellectually constructed laws. Thus, for the scientist, reality is explored as an evolutionary system of diverse entities, the order of which is determined by the principle of causality. Because Essentialism is a conceptual worldview that is not dependent on objective facts and measurements, it is not limited to empirical understanding or the objective way of looking at things. Just as Eastern mysticism teaches that reality is more than what the rational mind can formulate analytically from observing the nature of "otherness", the essentialist ontology transcends self/other dualism to define the undivided source — the ineffable ''Oneness'' alluded to in Eastern Philosophy.

Despite the metaphysical basis for the term, academics in science, aesthetics, heuristics, psychology, and gender-based sociological studies have all seen fit to advance their disparate and sundry causes under the banner of Essentialism. Possibly the clearest definition for this philosophy was offered by gay/lesbian rights advocate Diana Fuss, who wrote: "Essentialism is most commonly understood as a belief in the real, true essence of things, the invariable and fixed properties [of] which define the 'whatness' of a given entity".() Metaphysical essentialism stands diametrically opposed to existential realism in that finite existence is only differentiated appearance, whereas "ultimate reality" is held to be absolute essence.

Although the Greek philosophers believed that the true nature of the universe was perfect, they attributed the observed imperfections to man's limited perception. For Plato, this meant that there had to be two different realities: the "essential" and the "perceived". Plato's dialectical protégé Aristotle (384-322 B.C.) applied the term "essence" to the one common characteristic that all things belonging to a particular category have in common and without which they could not be members of that category; hence, the idea of ''rationality'' as the essence of man. This notion carried over into all facets of reality, including species of living creatures. For contemporary essentialists, however, the characteristic that all existents have in common is ''the power to exist'', and this potentiality defines the "uncreated" Essence.

It was the Egyptian-born philosopher Plotinus [270-204 B.C.] who brought Greek Idealism to the Roman Empire as Neo-Platonism, and with it the concept that not only do all existents emanate from a "primary essence" but that the mind plays an active role in shaping or ordering the objects of perception, rather than passively receiving experiential data. But with the Empire's fall to the Goths in A.D. 476, Neo-Platonism gave way to the spread of Christianity in the Western world, leaving Aristotle's multiple "essences" unchallenged to dominate philosophical thought throughout the Middle Ages on into the modern era of scientific objectivism.

In psychology

Essentialism has emerged as an important concept in psychology, particularly developmental psychology. Here, theorists distinguish between metaphysical essentialism (see above) and psychological essentialism, the latter referring not to an actual claim about the world but a claim about a characteristic way of construing entities in the world. Influential in this area is Susan Gelman, who has outlined many domains in which children and adults construe classes of entities, particularly biological entities, in essentialist terms—i.e., as if they had an immutable underlying essence which can be used to predict unobserved similarities between members of that class. Others have suggested that social categories such as race come to be essentialized due to an over-extension of this biological mode of thinking.Paul Bloom of Yale University has stated that "one of the most exciting ideas in cognitive science is the theory that people have a default assumption that things, people and events have invisible essences that make them what they are. Experimental psychologists have argued that essentialism underlies our understanding of the physical and social worlds, and developmental and cross-cultural psychologists have proposed that it is instinctive and universal. We are natural-born essentialists."

In ethics

Classical Essentialism claims that some things are wrong in an absolute sense, for example murder breaks a universal, objective and natural moral law and not merely an adventitious, socially or ethically constructed one.

Many modern essentialists claim that right and wrong are moral boundaries which are individually constructed. In other words, things that are ethically right or wrong are actions that the individual deems to be beneficial or harmful.

In biology

It is often held that before evolution was developed as a scientific theory, there existed an essentialist view of biology that posited all species to be unchanging throughout time. Some religious opponents of evolution continue to maintain this view of biology (see creation-evolution controversy).

Recent work by historians of systematics has, however, cast doubt upon this view. Mary P. Winsor, Ron Amundson and Staffan Müller-Wille have each argued that in fact the usual suspects (such as Linnaeus and the Ideal Morphologists) were very far from being essentialists, and it appears that the so-called "essentialism story" (or "myth") in biology is a result of conflating the views expressed by philosophers from Aristotle onwards through to John Stuart Mill and William Whewell in the immediately pre-Darwinian period, using biological examples, with the use of terms in biology like species.

Essentialism and society and politics

Essentialist positions on gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, or other group characteristics, consider these to be fixed traits, discounting variation among group members as secondary.

Contemporary proponents of identity politics, including feminism, gay rights, and/or racial equality activists, generally take constructionist viewpoints, agreeing with Simone de Beauvoir that "one is not born, but becomes a woman", for example. However, this is a vexed issue. To the extent that essence implies permanence and inalterability, essentialist thinking tends to agree with political conservatism and militate against social change. Essentialist claims also have provided useful rallying-points for radical politics, including feminist, anti-racist, and anti-colonial struggles. In a culture saturated with essentialist modes of thinking, an ironic or strategic essentialism can sometimes be politically expedient.

In social thought, essentialism as a metaphysical claim is often conflated with biological reductionism. Most sociologists, for example, employ a distinction between biological sex and gender role. Similar distinctions across disciplines generally fall under the topic "nature versus nurture". However, this conflation can be contested. For example, Monique Wittig has argued that even biological sex is not an essence, and that the body's physiology is "caught up" in processes of social construction.

A recent effort to revive essentialist sociology suggests that there are consistent national continuties in social theory - German, French, Italian or American (see work by Donald Levine on the Vision of the Sociological Tradition, University of Chicago Press 1995). Gad Yair's work on German and French scholarship provides extensions for Levine's general thesis (The Golem and German Social Theory, 2008; Pierre Bourdieu: The Last Musketeer of the French Revolution, 2009 - both at Lexington books).

In history

Essentialism is used by some historians in listing essential cultural characteristics of a particular nation or culture. A people can be understood in this way. In other cases, the essentialist method has been used by members, or admirers, of an historical community to establish a praiseworthy national identity. Contrastingly, many historians reject essentialism as a form of determinism and prefer to contextualize cultural tropes within a broader lens of historical cause and effect.

See also

Social constructionism (an anti-essentialist position)

Structuralism

Poststructuralism

Traditionalist School

Educational essentialism

Vitalism

References

Further reading

Runes, Dagobert D. (1972) ''Dictionary of Philosophy'' (Littlefield, Adams & Co.). See for instance the articles on "Essence", pg.97; "Quiddity", pg.262; "Form", pg.110; "Hylomorphism", pg.133; "Individuation", pg.145; and "Matter", pg.191.

Barrett, H. C. (2001). On the functional origins of essentialism. ''Mind and Society, 3, Vol. 2'', 1–30.

Sayer, Andrew (August 1997) "Essentialism, Social Constructionism, and Beyond", ''Sociological Review'' 45 : 456.

Oderberg, David S. (2007) ''Real Essentialism'' New York, Routledge.

External links

Category:Metaphysical theories Category:Theories of aesthetics Category:Essentialism Category:Philosophy of life

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Ross Lovegrove (born, 1958, Penarth, Wales) is an industrial designer, perhaps best known for his work on the Sony Walkman.

Biography

He studied at Manchester Polytechnic (now Manchester Metropolitan University), graduating with a First Class BA in Industrial Design in 1980 and then went to the Royal College of Art, London in 1983 where he completed his master of design. His inspiration mainly comes from organic forms and structures.

In the early 80’s he worked as a designer for frog design in west Germany on projects such as walkmans for Sony, computers for Apple computers, later moved to Paris as a consultant to Knoll International, becoming author of the highly successful Alessandri office system. Invited to join the Atelier de Nîmes along with Jean Nouvel and Philippe Starck, consulting to amongst others Louis Vuitton, Hermes and Dupont.

Awards

Winner of numerous international awards his work has been extensively published and exhibited internationally including the museum of modern art in New York, the Guggenheim Museum, New York, the Axis Centre, Japan, the Pompidou Centre, Paris, and the Design Museum, London, where in 1993 he curated the first permanent collection. Lovegrove was awarded the World Technology Award by Time magazine and CNN in November 2005. The same year, he was awarded the very prestigious Red Dot Design Award for the products created for VitrA.

External links

Ross Lovegrove's official site

''Wallpaper*'' interview (2007)

designboom interview (2006)

TED Talks: Ross Lovegrove shares organic designs at TED in 2005

Design Indaba interview (2004)

design-engine.com interview (2003)

Ross Lovegrove in conversation with Dr. Albrecht Bangert, Design Miami 2008 Video at VernissageTV.

Ross Lovegrove at Cologne Design Week Cologne 2009 Video at Designspotter TV

with a grinder

Category:1958 births Category:Alumni of Manchester Metropolitan University Category:Living people Category:People from Penarth Category:Welsh industrial designers

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Coordinates	12°2′36″N77°1′42″N
name	Straylight Run
background	group_or_band
origin	Baldwin, Nassau County, New York
genre	Alternative rock, indie rock, emo
years active	2003–2010 (hiatus)
label	Universal, Republic, Victory
associated acts	Taking Back Sunday, Breaking Pangaea, Destry
website
past members	John NolanShaun CooperWill NoonMichelle DaRosa }}

Straylight Run is an indie rock band based in Baldwin, New York. Two of the members, Nolan and Cooper, had been members of Taking Back Sunday and have now rejoined that band. Their final releases are the EPs ''About Time'' and ''Un Mas Dos'', preceded by the full-length album entitled ''The Needles The Space''. Before the announcement of the return, Nolan had stated that Straylight Run would release a live CD, would be going on indefinite hiatus, but might reunite in the future.

Biography

When he was still a member of Taking Back Sunday, John Nolan wrote several songs that he didn't feel would go well with the band. After their departure, John and Shaun Cooper recorded several demos with Taking Back Sunday drummer Mark O'Connell. The band began to take its present form when drummer Will Noon was invited to join after his former band, Breaking Pangaea, broke up. Breaking Pangaea's former lead singer was Fred Mascherino, who later took Nolan's place in Taking Back Sunday. Shortly thereafter, John's sister, Michelle DaRosa, joined Straylight Run.

The band gained popularity after posting six demo songs for free download on their official site. By September of that year, they were playing to sold-out crowds in various cities in the Northeastern United States. One of their songs, "Hands in the sky" (Big shot) was used in the second to last episode of the second season of the FX show "Sons of Anarchy".

The band's name was taken from the final section of William Gibson's cyberpunk science-fiction novel ''Neuromancer''.

''Straylight Run'' (2004)

Due to John's and Shaun's involvement in their previous band, they were bound by contract to release an album under Victory Records. They began to record their first album in April 2004 and released their self-titled debut album ''Straylight Run'' on October 12, 2004 after a one-month postponement. The album sold over 11,000 copies in the first week, and made the Billboard Top 100 Albums list. In late 2005, the band toured with Simple Plan.

''Prepare to Be Wrong EP'' (2005)

On October 4, 2005 the band released their second record in the form of the ''Prepare to Be Wrong EP''. The CD comprised two old demos ("A Slow Descent" from the bands original demo, and "It Never Gets Easier" a demo from the sessions for their first CD ''Straylight Run'', although it was then known as "Costello"), a cover of Bob Dylan's "With God On Our Side" and 3 new songs. The CD ended their contract with Victory Records. Plans for a live DVD were in the works but were shelved.

''The Needles the Space'' (2007)

On June 19, 2007 the band released their second album, ''The Needles the Space'', under Universal Records.

On December 8, 2007 the band was dropped from Universal Records.

The band toured in support of Bayside in February and early March, 2008. The band toured in support of The Used on the inaugural Get a Life Tour from March 31 through May 11, 2008.

On June 3, 2008 Michelle DaRosa announced that she would be leaving Straylight Run to pursue a solo career. In her MySpace message, she left the door open to rejoining the band at some future time. In late 2008, DaRosa formed the band Destry which also features Sam Means of the indie rock group The Format, as well as Shaun Cooper from Straylight Run.

''Un Mas Dos'' EP and indefinite hiatus (2008-present)

On June 10, 2008 the band entered the studio for pre-production on their next CD, an EP entitled ''Un Mas Dos''. While the band made the three songs available on the EP available in streaming format through MySpace and other means, and began selling digital download cards at its tour beginning September 9, 2008, on September 16, 2008 the band released the album in a digital format. A vinyl format is also available.

After two tours in late 2008, the band is playing the Soundwave Festivals in Australia in February and March 2009, as well as two shows with Minus the Bear. The band then plans to do further recording, towards another EP.

In February 2010, Straylight Run announced they were going on an indefinite hiatus due to financial complications. John Nolan stated that he would continue his solo act, and was not against the idea of returning to Straylight Run. Shaun Cooper wrote a blog saying that he was retiring from touring, thanking Straylight Run and also thanking Taking Back Sunday and saying he is really proud of the work and success they have accomplished. On March 31, 2010 it was confirmed that John Nolan and Shaun Cooper had returned to Taking Back Sunday.

On June 4, 2011, Nolan and Cooper teamed up with Taking Back Sunday drummer Mark O'Connell to play a show at Rogue Live Studios in Hicksville, NY, with their set featuring six Straylight Run songs.

Discography

Albums

''Straylight Run'' (2004)

''The Needles the Space'' (2007)

EPs

''Prepare to Be Wrong'' (October 4, 2005)

''3 Track EP'' (2007)

''Un Mas Dos'' (September 16, 2008) ''About Time'' (May 20, 2009)

Demos

''Demo'' (2003) # "It’s Everybody’s Fault But Mine" # "Existentialism on Prom Night" # "A Slow Descent" # "It’s For The Best" # "Mistakes We Knew We Were Making" # "The Tension and the Terror"

Singles

2004 "Existentialism on Prom Night"

2005 "Hands in the Sky (Big Shot)"

2007 "Soon We'll Be Living in the Future"

2007 "Still Alone"

Videography

2004 "Existentialism on Prom Night"

2005 "Hands in the Sky (Big Shot)"

2007 "Buttoned Down" (video only; no single; included on enhanced CD of ''The Needles the Space'')

2007 "Soon We'll Be Living in the Future"

2007 "How Do I Fix My Head" (video only; no single; included on enhanced CD of ''The Needles the Space'')

2007 "The Miracle That Never Came" (video only; no single; released on YouTube)

2009 "Wait and Watch" (video only; no single; released on Youtube)

The track "Hands In The Sky" was featured in season two of the show Sons of Anarchy.

References

External links

Official website

Victory Records artist page

Category:American indie rock groups Category:Musical groups from Long Island Category:Musical groups established in 2003 Category:Victory Records artists Category:Alternative rock groups from New York

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