LA TROBE UNIVERSITY, MELBOURNE/CHARLES UNIVERSITY, PRAGUE

and Smith: Jean-Pierre Vernant and Pierre Vidal-Naquet’s work on Greek mythology,

directly inspired by Lévi-Strauss’s writings but never dependent on his most basic anthropological premises. The flexible autonomy of their approach is further confirmed by its extension to other aspects of Greek culture, especially tragedy and philosophical thought. An evolving version of structural analysis thus serves to explore the imaginary of a whole civilization, and affinities with themes and procedures more familiar to civilizational analysts may be suggested. An appropriately adapted structural method can help to clarify the long-recognized

but still under-theorized role that configurations of basic concepts play in the

constitution of civilizations. And on the most fundamental level, growing acceptance

of the idea that civilizational ways of world-articulation are based on different

constellations of recurrent notions, rather than on separate and mutually

exclusive significations, opens up new fields for structural perspectives beyond

structuralism.

Questions implicit in the third part of the strong program have to do with three main issues: The relationship between understanding and explanation (the interpretation of texts, and of culture treated as text, is taken to be the most paradigmatic form of understanding); the explanatory focus on action and the justification for explanatory reference to complex agencies; finally, the role of causal claims in explanation. All these problems are linked to long-standing controversies, going far beyond the field of civilizational studies, and none of them can be discussed at length here. In regard to the first one, those who accept the strong program of cultural sociology – or tend towards similar views from other angles – will also find it easy to agree that discussions so far have failed to produce a convincing reductionistic account of understanding, be it as a mere variant of explanation or a specific but subordinate procedure, geared to explanatory goals.

On the other hand, the exclusive association of understanding with the human

sciences and of explanation with the natural ones prove untenable, and the only

plausible alternative is a distinction between different combinations of both

aspects on each side. But it should be added that at least in the case of the human

sciences (it is less obvious in the other main branch of scientific inquiry), the

relationship between understanding and explanation changes with the shifting

frameworks that prevail at successive stages (once again, Ricoeur’s analysis of

these transformations (1981: 145–64) should be singled out as a particularly

insightful overview). The specific implications of the civilizational approach are,

first and foremost, conducive to broader contexts of understanding, both on a

general level (in regard to the large-scale and long-term constellations of meaning

that define civilizations) and because of the particular perspective that has served

to reactivate the civilizational approach: the axial transformations must be seen

as exemplary cases of creative innovations whose understandable ramifications of

meaning go far beyond the connections that can be invoked for explanatory

purposes. Moreover, the particular complexity, endurance and interpretive

potential of traditions based on axial sources make them highly illustrative of the

hermeneutical principle, most clearly formulated by Gadamer, that meaning unfolds

in ways not reducible to intentional action.