ABSTRACT
The term “structuralism” can be understood in two ways. It can mean a method of analysis, that of the structural method, which aims at the search for knowledge and truth specific to the human sciences. But the term “structuralism” can also convey a second meaning that is of ideological and polemical usage: it designates a way of position-taking within the theoretical debates of the French intelligentsia of the 1960s and the 1970s. If structuralism is understood from its methodological choice, phenomenology from the very beginning is a sort of ally to structuralism. In the post-Husserlian development of phenomenology, Merleau-Ponty is among the first philosophers to embrace the method of structural analysis in his effort to provide a phenomenological elucidation of the specific character of human experience. One of the major criticisms of structuralists against Husserl’s transcendental phenomenology is related to the negligence of the central role of language in the activity of meaning formation.
