This major work from one of France's most innovative philosophers goes against the grain of analytic philosophy in arguing for the view known as anthropological holism. Meaning is not fundamentally a property of mental representations, Vincent Descombes says. Rather, it arises o…
Holism grows out of the philosophical position that an object or phenomenon is more than the sum of its parts. And yet analysis �a mental process crucial to human comprehension �involves breaking something down into its components, dismantling the whole in order to grasp it pi…
To understand what an individual "believes" we must take into account the full historical and institutional context of a person's life. But how can two people share the same thought if they do not share the same system of belief? Descombes solves this problem by developing a log…