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The epilogue undertakes to assess the intellectual exchange between religious communities and medical researchers in the Muslim world for the development of biomedical ethics. The problem-solving method adopted by the prestigious Islamic Juridical Council of the World Muslim League in Mecca, Saudi Arabia, is founded upon searching for normative responsa based on revealed sources only. The Council, represented by Sunni and Shi‘ite jurists, has deemphasized human dimension of medical enterprise by ignoring to evaluate human moral action and its ramifications for Islamic biomedical ethics. The classical juridical heritage, as demonstrated in this study, instead of functioning as a template for further moral reflection about critical human conditions and vulnerability in the context of modern healthcare institutions, has simply been retrieved to advance or obstruct legitimate advancements in biomedicine. Normative essentialism attached to evolving interhuman relationships has reduced Islamic jurisprudence to the search in the revealed texts rather than in theological ethics to estimate human nature and its ability to take the responsibility of actions performed cognitively and volitionally under variable circumstances. Religious and moral empowerment of average human person appears to be out of question for the Islamic religious establishment across Muslim world. It is this lack of empowerment of an individual capable of discerning right from wrong that makes Islamic juridical rulings in biomedicine inconsonant with international standards of human dignity and autonomous moral agency.

This chapter characterizes essentialism, and distinguishes essentialism about individuals from essentialism about natural kinds, arguing that the first does, but the second need not, involve de re (as opposed to de dicto) modality. It is argued that given certain plausible assumptions, essentialism about individuals involves a commitment to necessary a posteriori truth, although the commitment is not inevitable. The implications of the concepts of possible worlds and identity across possible worlds (‘transworld identity’) are discussed.

Essentialist and anti‐essentialist views of multicultural society are discussed, using data from the Fourth National Survey of Ethnic Minorities in Britain, which was undertaken in 1994. One of the survey findings was that there is much empirical support for those theorists who have emphasized the fluid and hybrid nature of contemporary post‐immigration ethnicities in Britain. It is argued that the political challenge is to reach for a multicultural Britishness that is happy with this hybridity, but also has space for religious identities, which have been largely neglected by theorists. The last part of the chapter discusses the importance of recognizing religious communities further.

This chapter focuses on Judith Butler's early work in order to clarify some central stakes (or mis-takes) of feminist postmodernism. It begins by acknowledging and responding to her insistence that the term “postmodernism” is misleading and masks a “ruse of authority” that distorts rather than clarifies the issues at hand. It is argued that establishing the feminist postmodern over and against a foreclosed“essentialism” amounts to a disavowal of the realm of necessity. A dual conception of “nature” as “human nature” and the natural world is foreclosed at the moment that inaugurates the textual space in which feminist postmodernism sets to work. This disavowed realm returns on the inside of Butler's theory as a discursive “nature,” which makes constant trouble in regards to the subject's agency, the subject's freedom. It is shown that Butler's approach to the relation between extradiscursive being and speech authorizes the displacement of feminism from its foundation, but not a foundation in the unitary subject so much as a foundation in a certain set of historical projects. The return of the repressed realm of necessity (or otherwise said, the repressed relation to the earth) in Butler's early texts, its return as discursive determinacy, pushes toward exactly what Butler turns to in her later work: the theme of embodied vulnerability in relation to other persons.

This introductory chapter begins with a discussion of the alliance between feminism and postmodernism in the US American academy. It discusses the emphatic anti-essentialism in the alliance between feminism and postmodernism. It then considers how both anti-essentialist feminists and their critics have addressed the problem of essentialism primarily as a problem of the one and the many.

This chapter sets up the problems of the book by giving historical and doctrinal perspective on Christian theologies of the body. It also introduces feminist concerns (dualism, essentialism, and constructivism) to be considered in a theology of the body that accounts for gender. Theologically, the problem of the body is brokenness and death, not materiality as such. Feminism aids in analyzing this problem, but a theological anthropology is needed in order to deal with the problem.

The distinction between natural necessity and metaphysical necessity is examined. An account is advanced of the logical form of statements of natural law, contrasting with that of D. M. Armstrong. The relationship between law-statements and counterfactual conditionals is discussed. The claim of scientific essentialists that natural laws are metaphysically necessary is challenged as resting on a questionable account of the identity conditions of properties. It is argued that Saul Kripke’s model of a posteriori knowledge of necessary truths does not enable us to understand how knowledge of natural laws is possible on the scientific essentialist view of them.

Following Nathan Salmon and D. H. Mellor, this chapter argues that natural kind essentialism of the type advocated by Kripke and Putnam is not an inevitable consequence of the adoption of an anti-descriptivist semantic theory of natural kind terms. It attempts to clarify various issues about the characteristics of natural kind essentialism and its relation to semantic theory, as well as reinforcing the distinction made earlier in the book between essentialism about individuals and essentialism about natural kinds. The author remains agnostic on the question of the truth of essentialism about natural kinds, but suggests reasons for scepticism about its plausibility in comparison with some weaker views, such as the theory that a natural kind has a Lockean ‘real essence’ which need not belong to the kind in all possible worlds.

The sense in which laws are necessary is reviewed. The relationship between natural laws and natural kinds is emphasized. The relationship between natural laws and causal powers is further explored, focusing on the advantages of an approach based on the four-category ontology over alternative theories of these matters. The claim of scientific essentialists that natural laws are metaphysically necessary is reviewed in the light of the problem known as ‘Bradley’s regress’, and is accepted in the case of fundamental laws but not in other cases. The idea that so-called natural or nomic necessity constitutes a genuine kind of necessity is challenged.

This chapter makes a negative case for Kant's manifest realism by criticizing the leading contemporary version of maximal scientific realism, namely, scientific essentialism. It begins with a discussion of what is scientific essentialism. It presents four distinct ways that Kant would criticize scientific essentialism: the empirical inaccessibility of the microphysical world, why there is no necessary a posteriori, the antimony of essentialism, and the logical contingency of the laws of nature.

This chapter aims to work out the positive theory behind Kant's surprising claim that gold is necessarily a yellow metal, using scientific essentialism only as a critical foil. It discusses Kant's theory of natural kind terms and scientific realism in the manifest image. It explains Kant's Other Joke, which vindicates both natural science in general and fundamental physics in particular in a way that would similarly flummox the noumenal scientific realist.

This chapter examines versions of so-called ‘sortal essentialism’. This is the view that some sortal concepts (roughly, concepts that provide criteria of identity or principles of individuation) represent essential properties of the things to which they apply. This chapter argues against Baruch Brody’s version of sortal essentialism, which appeals to a version of an ‘overlap requirement’ on de re possibilities, in order to argue that substance sortals — sortal concepts that must apply to an object throughout its existence if they apply to it at all — are essential sortals.