Abstract

JARAMILLO URIBE, Juan Manuel. French Structuralism and Metatheoric Structuralism. discus.filos [online]. 2009, vol.10, n.15, pp.23-50. ISSN 0124-6127.

In this paper, I intend to link the structuralism developed in France between 1960 and 1970 for the social and human sciences with the metatheoric structuralism developed by Joseph D. Sneed in 1971 as an extension of Bourbaki's program. To this end, I will consider as a 'bridge' the algebraic work about Claude Lévi-Strauss' theory on the elementary structures of kinship completed by the Bourbakian mathematician André Weil. I intend to show that Weil not only wants to demonstrate that the algebraic models of permutation are a case of elemental structure in the sense of Lévi-Strauss, but also, that thanks to that formalization, French structuralism obtains a mathematical notion of "structure" (instead of a linguistic one) in which some of its properties, intuitively identified by Lévi-Strauss, are pined down. Furthermore, I will discuss -beyond the intentions of Weil- whether elementary systems of kinship are adequately represented by the elementary models of permutation that Weil introduces, i.e., whether they are models in the structuralist sense.

Keywords : French Structuralism; Metatheoric Structuralism; Lévi-Strauss; Weil.

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