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n today’s crunchy, nutritious, theory-laden video, we discuss the basic problem that many people have with postmodernism and so on – namely, that it approaches the existence of things in a completely different way. The late 20th century shattered the view that was dominant for 25 centuries, since the philosopher Parmenides: that things simply exist. We follow Ferdinand de Saussure and Claude Levi-Strauss on their path from figuring out language to figuring out society to trying to figure out everything, how it finally failed, and why it was replaced by post-structuralism.

Chapters:
00:00 Introduction
3:08 I Being vs non-being: an easy victory
9:08 II Essentialism: things inside themselves
11:24 III The non-being of language
20:02 IV The non-being of everything
25:01 V The big question of structuralism
31:11 V The downfall of structuralism
35:30 VII What’s in it for us