Essentialism

Essentialism is the view that for any specific entity there is a set of attributes which are necessary to its identity and function. In Western thought the concept is found in the work of Plato and Aristotle. Platonic idealism is the earliest known theory of how all things and concepts have an essential reality behind them (an "Idea" or "Form"), an essence that makes those things and concepts what they are. Aristotle's Categories proposes that all objects are the objects they are by virtue of their substance, that the substance makes the object what it is. The essential qualities of an object, so George Lakoff summarizes Aristotle's highly influential view, are "those properties that make the thing what it is, and without which it would be not that kind of thing". 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 has been controversial from its beginning. Plato's Socrates already problematizes the concept of the Idea by positing in the Parmenides that if we accept Ideas of such things as Beauty and Justice (every beautiful thing or just action would partake of that Idea in some sense in order to be beautiful or just), we must also accept the "existence of separate forms for hair, mud, and dirt". In biology and other natural sciences, essentialism provided the basis for and rationale of taxonomy at least until the time of Charles Darwin; the precise role and importance of essentialism in biology is still a matter of debate. In gender studies, essentialism (summarized as the basic proposition that men and women are essentially different) continues to be a matter of contention.

French structuralist feminism was often accused of subscribing to an essentialism, which was set in contrast to gender constructionism.

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