The current philosophical discussion on holism and individualism can be considered on the basis of the notions of supervenience and intrinsic properties. A prominent conception of supervenience is David Lewis's thesis of Humean supervenience:

It is the doctrine that all there is to the world is a vast mosaic of local matters of particular fact, just one little thing and then another. … We have geometry: a system of external relations of spatio-temporal distance between points. Maybe points of spacetime itself, maybe point-sized bits of matter or aether or fields, maybe both. And at those points we have local qualities: perfectly natural intrinsic properties which need nothing bigger than a point at which to be instantiated. For short: we have an arrangement of qualities. And that is all. There is no difference without...