| Region: | Western philosophy |
| Era: | Contemporary philosophy |
| Vincent Descombes | |
| Birth Date: | 1943 |
| School Tradition: | Continental philosophy Libertarian socialism |
| Alma Mater: | University of Paris |
| Main Interests: | Philosophy of mind |
| Notable Ideas: | Post-Kojèvian discourse |
Vincent Descombes (in French dekɔ̃b/; born 1943) is a French philosopher. His major work has been in the philosophy of language and philosophy of mind.
Descombes 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, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger to the "three masters of suspicion", Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche and Sigmund Freud. In the same book, he introduced the term "post-Kojèvian discourse" to designate the period of French philosophy after the 1930s[1] (from 1933 to 1939, Alexandre Kojève delivered in Paris a series of lectures on Hegel's work The Phenomenology of Spirit that had an immense influence on 20th-century French philosophy).
Descombes teaches at the Centre de recherches politiques Raymond Aron, part of the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales. He holds an appointment in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago.
Descombes was a member of the French libertarian socialist group Socialisme ou Barbarie.