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Full-Text Articles in Arts and Humanities
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Seeking Natural Kinds In A Controversial Diagnosis, Paul Pfeilschiefter
Posttraumatic Stress Disorder: Seeking Natural Kinds In A Controversial Diagnosis, Paul Pfeilschiefter
Paul K Pfeilschiefter
Posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD) is a debilitating condition that results from the experience of a traumatic event. Natural kinds are mind-independent entities found in nature and are the objects of scientific inquiry. It is common to deny that PTSD is a natural kind, but extant denials assume a thesis of natural kinds that can be called “essentialism”. According to essentialism, many entities are not natural kinds that one would expect should be natural kinds. The homeostatic cluster view of natural kinds offers an alternative that accommodates these cases, including, superficially, the claim that PTSD is a natural kind. I introduce …
Population Thinking And Tree Thinking In Systematics, Robert O’Hara
Population Thinking And Tree Thinking In Systematics, Robert O’Hara
Robert J. O’Hara
Two new modes of thinking have spread through systematics in the twentieth century. Both have deep historical roots, but they have been widely accepted only during this century. Population thinking overtook the field in the early part of the century, culminating in the full development of population systematics in the 1930s and 1940s, and the subsequent growth of the entire field of population biology. Population thinking rejects the idea that each species has a natural type (as the earlier essentialist view had assumed), and instead sees every species as a varying population of interbreeding individuals. Tree thinking has spread through …