Continental Philosophy

Post-Structuralism is a response to earlier theories. Asserting that neither underlying structures (i.e., Structuralism) nor subjective experience (i.e., Phenomenology) are adequate to understand the meaning and significance of an object, Post-Structuralism argues that such understanding entails interrogation/deconstruction of both what is present (i.e., the meaningful/significant object) and what is absent (i.e., the mostly implicit systems of knowledge that define the object and render it meaningful/significant).

Structuralism suggests that meaning exists neither in words, nor in the links between words and whatever those words designate. Rather, meaning is argued to arise and reside in complex, evolving webs of association that span and implicate all aspects of culture.

Phenomenology might be better construed as a discourse on “unlearning” than a discourse on “learning.” It begins with the assertion that the world one experiences is not the world as it is, but the world as one has learned to perceive it. It seeks to break with familiar acceptance of “how things are” and to interrogate what phenomena were like before we learned to perceive them.