Skamieniały płód: dwie historie o nauce, zachwycie, lęku i zadziwieniu
A Petrified Foetus: Two Stories on Science, Admiration, Dread and Amazement

Summary/Abstract: This article juxtaposes two narratives: one from a work by a sixteenth-century surgeon and the other being a present-day film story of the infotainment genre – both being stories on a foetus that had atrophied in its mother’s womb and got petrified some time after. Created in two different social-cultural contexts, they differ as to their rhetoric. Do they tell similar stories, or, are the convergences external only? There are more questions as if hidden behind this one: How does the question on knowledge and its limits manifest itself in various epochs? Does the strife for epistemological capture of the world remain in a dialectic relation with a desire for finding whatever reaches beyond such an order? If so, how can one gain insight in the dialectic’s dynamism? The juxtaposition of cultural records in question contributes to an answer.

• Details
• Contents