ABSTRACT
We often hear about the death of essentialism in the philosophy of biology. Biological species are supposed to have no essences and no necessary characteristics. So according to Gillian Barker and Philip Kitcher, “There are no properties essential to Drosophila melanogaster (the famous fruit fly) or to Homo sapiens” (2014: 40). Before Darwin, the familiar story goes, species appeared to be definable in terms of their essences. But biologists now get by without these, “identifying species without supposing that they have essences” (Barker & Kitcher 2014: 41). Michael Ghiselin agrees: species “cannot be defined, in the sense of listing properties they simply must have” (1987: 129). For Michael Hardimon, “the concept species can be articulated in either essentialist or nonessentialist ways. Contemporary biology has vindicated the nonessentialist alternative as true of real existing species” (2013: 5).
