Structure and the Whole - East, West and Non-Darwinian Biology in the Origins of Structural Linguistics (Hardcover)

This book identifies the Romantic notion of the whole as the fundamental epistemological source of the notion of structure in the thinking of the Prague Linguistic Circle, primarily its Russian representatives, and studies what amounted to the slow, painful process of disengagement from the organicist metaphor in an intellectual world very different from Saussure's.