holism

American  

[hoh-liz-uhm] / ˈhoʊ lɪz əm /

Sometimes wholism

noun

1. Philosophy. the theory that whole entities, as fundamental components of reality, have an existence other than as the mere sum of their parts.

2. Medicine/Medical. Also care of the entire patient in all aspects of well-being, including physical, psychological, and social.

3. Psychology. any psychological system postulating that the human mind must be studied as a unit rather than as a sum of its individual parts.

4. Anthropology. an emphasis on the dynamic interrelatedness of mind, body, the individual, society, and the physical environment as key to understanding cultural phenomena.

   In anthropology, holism seeks to understand humans as both biological and cultural beings, as living in both the past and the present.

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holism British  

/ ˈhəʊlɪzəm /

noun

1. any doctrine that a system may have properties over and above those of its parts and their organization

2. the treatment of any subject as a whole integrated system, esp, in medicine, the consideration of the complete person, physically and psychologically, in the treatment of a disease See also alternative medicine

3. philosophy one of a number of methodological theses holding that the significance of the parts can only be understood in terms of their contribution to the significance of the whole and that the latter must therefore be epistemologically prior Compare reductionism atomism

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Other Word Forms

• holist noun

Etymology

Origin of holism

hol- + -ism; term introduced by J.C. Smuts in Holism and Evolution (1926)

Explanation

If you believe in holism, you think that a person's being is one whole, and that you can't separate it out into body versus mind. Holism is what it sounds like: the idea that problems or questions need to be treated as wholes, instead of breaking them into little parts. It's not that in holism there's no acknowledgement of parts, but just that the only way to understand parts is in their relationship to the whole, whether that's the role of canoeing in your education, stress in your illness, or the way salt interacts with butter in your baking.

Example Sentences

No care of scientific holism — and certainly no empathy.

From Salon • Jul. 11, 2023

It’s a tidy little dance of intergovernmental holism.

From Seattle Times • Jan. 15, 2023

It merely rehearses more than 60 years of unanswered criticisms, intractable shortcomings and repeated failures that have largely derived from what cognitive scientist Zenon Pylyshyn in 1987 called “problems of holism in reasoning”.

From Nature • Oct. 1, 2019

And the moral arguments in favor of holism are powerful.

From The New Yorker • Oct. 31, 2016

Any notion of inventive holism pretty much died when Microsoft unbundled Kinect from Xbox One.

From Time • Nov. 26, 2014