Vincent Descombes
Vincent Descombes ( born 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, he received an assistantship in Paul Ricoeur, the - the German Habilitation appropriate - Doctorat du troisième cycle with a study of Platonism. He then taught philosophy in Nice, Montreal, 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 Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales in Paris.
Work
In his first publications, Descombes busy with philosophical problems of psychoanalysis and with the critical representation of contemporary French philosophy. Since 1980, he turned to analytic philosophy and is based in particular on the work of Ludwig Wittgenstein, Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach. In his efforts to deal with philosophical issues that were far outside the region of interest of analytic philosophy with the conceptual means, it follows from Ernst Tugendhat.
With the newly acquired method, he first turned to the critique of phenomenology and structuralism and post-structuralism of the French, whose argumentative and logical flaws he mercilessly exposes ( Grammaire d' objets en tous genres, 1983). Characteristic of all his books is in addition to the elegance of his style, the extensive and often very critical account of work especially French theorists and its available across the whole spectrum of the developed within the various currents of traditional and analytic philosophy arguments.
In the following years, he showed that this approach can be applied fruitfully to other areas: narrative analysis ( Proust: philosophy du roman, 1987) and - in debate with Jürgen Habermas - the philosophy of history, present diagnosis (philosophy par gros temps, 1989).
Since 1990, Descombes preoccupied with the philosophy of psychology, social philosophy, subjectivity theory and action theory. In the two books La not denree mental and Les institutions du sens he developed in discussion with phenomenological, structuralist and cognitive theoretical approaches a thought of Wittgenstein, Dumont, and Peirce aufgreifende holistic theory of mind and intentionality, which follows the principle that thoughts localize " in our heads ", but social structures are, the structure can be described adequately with elementary means of the logic of relations.
In his most recent work, Le complement de sujet (2004) Descombes then developed to Wittgenstein and Tugendhat on the basis of the model of language acquisition theory of subjectivity, which is not intended as a reflexive self-relation and should thus escape the traditional logical problems subjectivity theoretical 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 philosophy in France; 1933 - 1978, translated by Ulrich Raulff, Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1983, ISBN 3-518-27946-7.
Most books have also been published in English translation.