Blackwell Reference Online

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The root of ‘structure’ goes back to Greek storennumi ‘spread’ and its Latin derivative struo ‘put in order’, hence to arrange or build. In the history of philosophy the term seems not to have had a technical use until the emergence of structuralism , though in mathematics and the sciences it has carried theoretical weight (group structure, molecular structure, etc.). It has however been used informally by many philosophers. An early example occurs in Richard Price, who in 1787 criticized the view that ‘our approbation of goodness’ might be derived from ‘an arbitrary structure of our minds’ (1948; p. 136). More recently the term appears in some familiar titles: Carnap's The Logical Structure of the World (1928), merleau -P onty's The Structure of Behavior (1942), Goodman's The Structure of Appearance (1955), Ernest Nagel's The Structure of Science (1961). Its occurrence in a title, however, doesn't mean that much attention will be paid to its definition in the work in question, even when there is an explicit metaphysical connection, as in Morris Lazerowitz's The Structure of Metaphysics (1955) or Stefan Körner's Metaphysics: Its Structure and Function (1984). In Carnap's title ‘structure’ is a translation of the German Aufbau . German also has Struktur , used by Wittgenstein and, earlier, by Marx , for whom it names the economic relations on which ideology ... log in or subscribe to read full text