ABSTRACT
The holism-reductionism debate is one of those debates that comes down to whether one want to look for the simplest explanation for something or the most complex explanation. The idea of reductionism also began in ancient Greece but was later taken up by Descartes who argued that the way to understand a complex phenomenon was to break it down, step by step, into simpler processes, which can help to show its formation. Reductionism is an attempt to explain behaviour in its simplest possible terms, focusing on one of the factors identified by Aristotle, e.g. to understand behaviour one could purely focus on the biochemical factors that cause it. Developments in brain scanning have made it possible to identify the parts of the brain involved in a range of human behaviours that previously could have only been identified post-mortem.
