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Articles

Why alchemists can make gold

Rebecca Bryant on the essence of essentialism.

Essentialism is the doctrine that the objects which we (correctly) group together (such as all trees or all tables), belong together by virtue of some fundamental unchanging nature which they all possess. This fundamental nature may take the form of a set of defining properties which are singly necessary and jointly sufficient for membership in a class. Or, more recently, it has been taken to be some kind of underlying internal structure, which is amenable to scientific discovery. ¹

The question I want to ask is, “Do particular objects really possess essences by virtue of which an intrinsically correct classification of all the objects in the world can be produced for once and for all?”

Let’s start off with the easy case of artefacts; things like chairs and tables, with which, I hope, we are all familiar. A mathematician recently commented, “Surely the reason that we call all tables ‘table’ is because they are all tables, Rebecca!” What this shows is that we tend to assume that things labelled with the same term must share something fundamental in common.

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