Essentialism, history, and biological taxa.
de Queiroz (1995), Griffiths (1999) and LaPorte (2004) offer a new version of essentialism called "historical essentialism". According to this version of essentialism, relations of common ancestry are essential features of biological taxa. The main type of argument for this essentialism proposed by Griffiths (1999) and LaPorte (2004) is that the dominant school of classification, cladism, defines biological taxa in terms of common ancestry. The goal of this paper is to show that this argument for historical essentialism is unsatisfactory: cladism does not assume that relations of common ancestry are essential attributes of biological taxa. Therefore, historical essentialism is not justified by cladism.
Department of Philosophy, University of Calgary, 2500 University Drive, NW, Calgary, Canada AB T2N 1N4. makmiller@gmail.com
Makmiller
M
Pedroso
D001695:Biology; D002965:Classification; D010684:Philosophy; D010802:Phylogeny