KLOD LEVI-STROSS’S REASON PHILOSOPHY: METHODOLOGICAL HOLISM OR ATOMISM?
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Abstract
The article deals with the methodological basis of the philosophy of Spirit, i.e. the positions of holism and atomism in the analysis of mental phenomena. The analysis is carried out through the case of French anthropologist Claude Lévi-Strauss’s philosophy of Spirit and exhibits an internal conflict between the holistic position of Lévi-Strauss-anthropologist and the atomistic position of Lévi-Strauss-philosopher. The conflict causes a methodological ambivalence in structural anthropology. The author examines consequences of Lévi-Strauss’s methodological hesitations, e.g. naturalization of Spirit, reducing its structures to neurophysiologic processes of the brain, turning structural anthropology into formal anthropology which substitutes the analysis of complex social practices with revealing intellectual schemes of mutual exchange, as well as inability of the naturalized philosophy of Spirit to explain the nature of social rules and representations, irredundant to the causal properties of natural processes, and furthermore, to show how the sense (the signifiable) can arise from the totality of material forms (the signifying), how Spirit can result from matter. The article points out the similarity between Lévi-Strauss’s atomic concept of Spirit and American philosophy of mind represented in ‘new mentalism’.
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