Publisher's Synopsis
This is the distillation of more than 20 years' work in and around the movement of thought it describes and reformulates. A treatment of structuralism commonly understood as a philosophical position rather than as a cultural trend, is an essential and enduring element in the theoretical self-understanding of the contemporary world.;Complemented by phenomenology on the one hand and by materialism on the other, structuralism is capable of providing a world-view that reconciles age-old conflicts between nature and society, objective and subjective, individual and group. It is therefore not to be considered displaced by post-structuralism but remains as an enduring contribution to the legacy of philosophy.;This study is divided into two parts. Firstly, structuralism is treated from the point of view of recent intellectual history, especially in America and France, and then from the point of view of its contributing disciplines, especially linguistics and anthropology. In the second part, structuralism is approached indirectly, through philosophical work on language, meaning, mind and society, and it is here that the author sets out his own formulations and reformulations, offering an alternative way of looking at the intelligibility of the human sciences.
