Spending a week in a place where I do not know a word of the language (even if it it doesn’t really matter from a tourist perspective) and many hours in flight with bad (Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer bad) movies as entertainment gave me some motivation and time to think about phenomenology and structuralism. At some point during a ginger ale and rice crackers fueled state I thought it might be a good idea to perform a “structural” analysis of structuralism and phenomenology. Perhaps reflecting on the language I know that describes each concept will enhance my understanding.

I further developed this exercise to try and restrict myself to other “philosophical” words that I see used in the discussions of phenomenology and structuralism. Some concepts may not quite fit because I either don’t understand them or the category, but it’s a learning exercise and those are impervious to wrong answers. Unless it’s graded and it’s not.

Finally, language is seemingly infinite so I tried to limit myself to related terms and or other “philosophical” concepts.

Phenomenology

• Postmodern
• Real (Stolterman usage)
• Subjective
• Hermeneutics
• Relativism
• Deconstuction

Structuralism

• Modern
• Positivist
• Rational
• True (Stolterman usage)
• Objective
• Deterministic

I see a lot of antonym pairs in the list. I know the concepts are not necessarily opposites, but I think I’m internalizing them as such which is probably a bad thing. How can this be avoided?

What words do you use to describe phenomenology and structuralism? Let’s put the community hive mind to good use.