Necessity, Teleology, and Darwin: A Defense of Aristotelian Essentialism

Abstract

I begin with an elaboration on the progressivist anti-Aristotelian narratives that caricature Aristotle and dismiss him as a natural philosopher so to establish the terms of a rebuttal in his favor. In Part One I focus on Aristotle’s essentialism from a more general metaphysical viewpoint. With the general position explicated and defended, in Part 2 I focus on combating a more specific critique from the vantage point of Darwinian natural selection and the ontological status of species. I conclude that the proposition “if natural selection is true then Aristotelian Species Essentialism is false” is false.