Vincent Descombes (born 1943)[1] is a French philosopher. His major work has been in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind. He is particularly noted for a lengthy critique in two volumes of the project he calls cognitivism, and which is, roughly, the view current in philosophy of mind that mental and psychological facts can ultimately be treated as, or reduced to, physical facts about the brain. Descombes has also written an introduction to modern French philosophy (Le même et l'autre) focused on the transition, after 1960, from a focus on the three H's, Hegel, Husserl and Heidegger to the "three masters of suspicion", Marx, Nietzsche and Freud.
Abstract:
"Externalism about the mind” is the view that mental states and attitudes cannot be attributed to a subject in abstraction from her/his exterior environment. This paper will revisit the issue of externalism from the perspective of a social philosophy of action.