"The West's 'father of structuralism', Ferdinand de Saussure (1857– 1913), spent his academic career in Paris studying and teaching the Sanskrit grammar of Panini. Saussure's PhD was on conjugate verbs in Sanskrit, and he in turn influenced Claude Lévi-Strauss (1908–2009), the eminent anthropologist. Lévi-Strauss was only one of many Western thinkers influenced by Saussure's work, though. After Saussure's death, his students published his class notes posthumously but removed all traces and references to Sanskrit, Panini and Indian texts, replacing them with generic and universal principles that could be applied to modern European languages! The philosophical principles contained therein became known as structuralism, revolutionizing European art, sociology, history, philosophy and psychology. Structuralism was the precursor of post-structuralism, the philosophical core of postmodern thought."