Vincent Descombes

from Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Vincent Descombes (* 1943 ) is a French philosopher and one of the most famous representatives of analytical philosophy in France.

Descombes studied philosophy and sociology at the Sorbonne and graduated with a thesis on Louis Dumont . In 1970, after an assistantship with Paul Ricœur, he received the Doctorat du troisième cycle - corresponding to the German habilitation - with a study of Platonism . He then taught philosophy in Nice , Montréal , Montpellier , and Paris . From 1983 to 1992 he taught French literature at Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore and at Emory University in Atlanta . Since 1993 he has been Directeur d'Etudes at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris.

plant

In his first publications Descombes deals with philosophical problems of psychoanalysis and with the critical presentation of contemporary French philosophy. Since 1980 he has been turning to analytical philosophy, focusing in particular on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein , Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach . In his endeavors to treat philosophical topics that were previously outside the area of ​​interest of analytical philosophy with their conceptual means, he followed up Ernst Tugendhat .

With the newly acquired method, he initially turned to the critique of phenomenology as well as French structuralism and poststructuralism , whose argumentative and logical shortcomings he relentlessly reveals ( Grammaire d'objets en tous genres , 1983). In addition to the elegance of his style, characteristic of all his books is the extensive, often very critical consideration of the works of mainly French theorists and his disposition over the entire spectrum of arguments developed within the various currents of traditional and analytical philosophy.

In the following years he showed that this approach can also be made fruitful in other areas: narrative analysis ( Proust: philosophie du roman , 1987) and - in discussion with Jürgen Habermas - the historical- philosophical diagnosis of the present ( philosophy par gros temps , 1989).

Since 1990 Descombes has been concerned primarily with the philosophy of psychology , social philosophy , subjectivity theory and the theory of action . In the two books La denrée mentalale and Les institutions du sens , he developed a holistic theory of mind and intentionality that takes up the ideas of Wittgenstein, Dumont and Peirce , which follows the principle that thoughts do not " "localized in our heads, but are social structures whose structure can be adequately described with elementary means of relational logic.

In his last work to date, Le complement de sujet (2004), Descombes developed a theory of subjectivity based on the model of language acquisition based on Wittgenstein and Tugendhat, which is not thought of as a reflexive self-relationship and is thus intended to escape the traditional logical problems of subjectivity-theoretic approaches.

Publications

  • Le platonisme . Paris: PUF, 1971.
  • L'inconscient malgré lui . Paris: Minuit, 1977.
  • Le même et l'autre. Quarante-cinq ans de philosophie française (1933-1978) . Paris: Minuit, 1979.
    • German: The same and the other. 45 years of philosophy in France; 1933 - 1978 , translated by Ulrich Raulff, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-518-27946-7 .
  • Grammaire d'objets en tous genres . Paris: Minuit, 1983.
  • Proust: philosophy du roman . Paris: Minuit, 1987.
  • Philosophy par great temps . Paris: Minuit, 1989.
  • Les disputes de l'esprit . Vol. I: La denrée mental . - Vol. II: Les institutions du sens . Paris, Minuit, 1995-1996.
  • (together with A. Boyer, A. Comte-Sponville): Pourquoi nous ne sommes pas nietzschéens . Paris: LGF, 2002. (= Biblio essais.)
  • Le complement de sujet . Paris: Gallimard, 2004.
  • "Un itinéraire philosophique. Entretien avec Vincent Descombes". In: Esprit, juillet 2005.

Most of the books have also been published in English translation.

Web links
personal data
SURNAME Descombes, Vincent
BRIEF DESCRIPTION French philosopher
DATE OF BIRTH 1943