A place for majestic STEMLORD peacocking, as well as memes about the realities of working in a lab.
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This is a science community. We use the Dawkins definition of meme.
And Plato would have gotten away with it too, if not for those meddling kids and their cladistics. Essentialism has been hugely damaging and is the foundation of most types of Creationism. https://newdiscourses.com/2021/02/essentialism-logical-fallacy-plaguing-us-since-plato/
So, I gave this a cursory read.
The discussion of essentialism mostly makes sense, if a few weird red flags scattered throughout. But I was curious at what point it would be turned into, as promised in the intro, that essentialism is a fundamental flaw of "wokeism", and apparently specifically Critical Race Theory.
And uh. That connection was poorly made, in my humble opinion. It's a lot of philosophical history and bluster to then just sort of... miss the point and mischaracterize the quotes being put on the table.
My apologies, I would be more specific and pointed in my critique here, but I'm on mobile and I usually need a better setup (e.g. on PC) to lay out these thoughts with more precision.
Yea, I started to get suspicious when he called Hegel a fool and a fraud.
The ironic part is that the author himself relies on definitions to make his point. He slyly asserts that "social constructs" are "made up" and therefore should and can be ignored like Mr. Snuffleupagus. Of course, I doubt that the author would claim that there are no social differences between a black woman and black man, because that would expose his argument for what it is.
He writes to say: There is no essence in these identities, therefore we can ignore them. His argument is just a bunch of jargon piled on top of "I don't see race".
Ah that what happens when you Google an article which explanes some historical connection to Plato etc but it then uses that to make a completely unrelated point ie woke is bad. I should have read the whole thing before linking it. Looking at the other articles on the site it is indeed mostly right wing propaganda. A better point is Dawnkin's post about Platonic forms here https://www.edge.org/response-detail/25366 in response to the question what scientific idea should be retired in 2014? He points out essentialism is a problem for accepting evolution, and for so many other things.
Oof. Yeah they'll get ya like that. I'm certainly not immune.
Your link isn't working properly.
It's a cool read though - I'm still reading it, but so far it did a great job showing that concepts are fuzzy and inside our heads, not those well-defined abstractions in some external realm.
If you're going to get rid of essentialism, you're going to have take on bigger fish than creationists. Because the problem of essentialism is not that it objectifies everything, it's that it refuses to understand the difference between language and ideas.
The worst essentialists are called structuralists or logocentrics. This kind of thinking is dominant in Western Philosophy and it infects the minds of people you probably respect, progressives like Noam Chomsky and reactionaries like Christopher Hitchens.
Essentialism is like capitalism. It's in the air we breath and the water we drink. It's so accepted and conventional that people will assume your a fool for describing or criticizing it.