Peter Caws

How is it possible to speak of structuralism at the end of the millennium, except in the past tense—historically? But has structuralism really sung its swan song? It is hard not to fall prey to the historicism that has been so pervasive in Western thought in the last two hundred years. Yet this is a congress of philosophy, not history nor sociology. What philosophy looks for in structuralism is quite different from what history, or sociology, or even anthropology may find. Therefore, I begin from an avowedly ahistoricist stance since I am not interested in structuralism as a movement, but as a position, and I intend to discuss it as such.