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Starting from the Old Polish proverb "Człowiek – Boże igrzysko" ("Man – A God’s Plaything") the paper discusses the previous etymological attempts to decipher the very meaning of the lexeme/sign human in Polish/Slavic, Greek, Latin and Hebrew, arguing that not only the signifié of the sign human deserves to be called "A God’s Plaything", but does it also its nominal signifiant.
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The text is devoted to the lexicographic reflection of human conceptualization in its various functions and roles. The aim of the article is to look at the term human as an element used to define words naming other elements of the world and to analyze the ways of codifying this conceptualization in the content of dictionary definitions, which are the result of the reflection of qualified lexicographers who can carefully observe the linguistic reality. The analyzes are based on definitions from dictionaries of contemporary Polish, in which the term human/people appear.
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The presented paper is an attempt to reflect on three ways characteristic to Western philosophy and culture of defining man in terms of image, sign and strength. Thinking about a man in terms of an image introduces a complex notion of fantasy. Thinking about man in terms of a sign introduces the no less complex notion of language as a code and a set of riddles. Finally, thinking of a man in terms of strength forces author to rethink the very category of desire. Finally, the author tries to reflect on the contemporary possibility of redirecting thinking about man beyond language (sign), image (imagination) and strength (desire).
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The article focuses on the semiotic analysis of arrays of iconic and verbal elements that create pages of John Amos Comenius’s "Orbis sensualium pictus" (1658). Bohemian pedagogue has composed each plate of the schoolbook as an analogon of the complete sign relation model. Comenius has shortened the distance between representations in the book and their referents: signs signify indexically, also inalienability of the referent as an object in the sign relation has been assumed and implied. Manifesting its encyclopaedic ambitions to encompass the whole of the pupil’s world, the book reveals itself as a complete semiotic system. Particularly modelled sign relations are in fact one of the strategies of generating the world presence effect within encyclopaedic space of the schoolbook.
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The article explores a difficult passage from "Passio Perpetuae et Felicitatis" (ΧΙ, 5-6, Satur’s description of the staying of the executed martyrs in paradise). The bewilderment of publishers and translators is caused by the spectacle of the trees that lose their leaves in the Garden of Eden, instead of eternal blossom or bearing fruit, which was the topic of “heavenly text”. As a way out, they chose the marginal reading “the leaves were on fire” or the conjecture “the leaves were singing”. However we are not talking about the species of rosewood, but about the unprecedented huge not bush but tree of the rose, which continuously drops fragrant petals, never exposing the branches. In the practice of Romans, a shower with rose petals correlated with both – the solemn glorification of the triumphant and the mourning commemoration of the departed, called Rosalia, since the grave, crypt, monument were decorated with roses. In the Passio the grave meeting of the living, who remained on earth, and the souls of the dead martyrs, takes place in the Eden under the shade of a rose tree, which is mystically identical to visiting their graves decorated by rose bushes.
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Considering the category of the Byzantine canon Yuri Lotman remarks that, looking from the historic point of view, it is not the transition from one sign to another, but going deeply into the sign. The new text remains always the new-discovered old text. Byzantine art is generally sacral art, and it’s strictly connected with the experience of orthodox faith. The art finds its expression in the canon. The faith finds its expression in the dogma. Therefore the histories of Byzantine art and of Byzantine theology are related. Their turning-point is Iconoclasm, that concludes the period of formation of Christian dogma and of iconographic canon. After the last Council (787) and the Triumph of Orthodoxy (843) the dogma of faith and the dogma of art is generally configurated. It is the period of consolidation and contemplation the dogma and the canon, the period of “going deeply into the sign”.
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The paper pertains to treatening a linguistic sign as unconventional, i.e., invariant, with its content and expressive shape (form) rigidly attached to each other. A given content can be expressed in one way only, there is no synonymy, no polisemy, no translation. The phonetic aspect of the linguistic sign, its exceptional liturgical expression (prounanciation) in the Old Slavic language is examined, expression that is rooted – as by Boris Uspensky’s findings – in the XII Century. By the reference to texts been read during the Christmas Liturgy Service in the female monastyr in Wojnowo (Poland), in 1977, the most characteristic features of the prounanciation are scrutinized. The unconventional sign underlies the binary of culture, different aspect of life gain their semiotic importance.
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The article analyses the personal code of the Corpus Christi feast in Spycimierz (Poddębice county, Łódź voivodeship), distinguished by its tradition of a two-metre wide flower carpet created by the parishioners along the entire two-kilometre route of the procession. The author applies an innovative solution by using the findings of V. Propp concerning character functions in a fairy tale to interpret the ritual. The author identifies the following ritual roles: 1) the hero-protagonist (collective: the whole community of the parish, children scattering flower petals; individual: people skilled in creating flower patterns and managing works); 2) the villain (people who hamper flower picking and tourists destroying flower carpets); 3) the donor (institutional: parish priests, the mayor; individual: people giving flowers to parishioners); 4) the helper (families and tourists coming to Spycimierz to arrange flower carpets together with the parishioners); 5) the false hero (people from the parish who take credit for the feast but do not help prepare it). To sum up, the article presents the ritual process of transformation of the parishioners and their guests into ritual characters.
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On April 10, 2010 Smolensk catastrophe happened. A few days after the crash, scouts put a cross in front of the Presidential Palace as a symbol of remembrance for the victims of the crash. From that moment a rapid process of dichotomization of the Polish society started. In my analysis I focus on considering the process of symbolic encoding of the cross in the social discourse in the context of theories of social constructivism, sociology of knowledge, symbolic interactionism, sociolinguistics and communication theory.
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Like Copernicus, Darwin revolutionized the place of a man within creation: he thrown the man from the top position in the chain of beings and placed him among other living beings. Emergence of human as a species was not an unique act. Humans evolved within primates in a result of inherently non-directional evolutionary processes, and human is by no means one of this kind among animals. In a geological timescale, even the impact of humans on the Earth ecosystem may not prove profound. Thus, the proposed geological epoch “anthropocene” reflects human fondness for our own greatness.
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In the year 2020 biomedical scientists have been faced with an unprecedented challenge, but on the other hand the established process of science communication has been perturbed, as results which had not been peer reviewed have been published very rapidly and the press and politicians have become involved in their distribution and evaluation, and this has met with a rapid reaction from scientists.
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In the article, the author analyzes photos which are representing the victims of nuclear attacks and the so-called shadows of Hiroshima. She reflects on the role of the wounded body and scar in creating a story about an atomic catastrophe and the status of a victim created by selected survivors. She examines the status of photography after atomic attacks and the role it plays in creating an archive of this event.
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All narrative genres of French medieval literature employ a complex rhetorical device which is conceived to persuade the reader to believe in the historical veracity of the narrative that he or she is reading. That this and other related discursive devices can also be found in a chronicle may strike one as surprising, considering that this genre depends on historical referentiality by definition. My analysis of the 13th-century chronicles of Henry of Valenciennes has shown that the notion of ‘truth’ presented in the text does not fit within the narrow parameters of referential or historical truth. This broader notion of truth can be referred to as syncretic truth, one that combines the truth about historical events with commonly accepted cultural assumptions, beliefs, and ideals. It is on the authority of this notion of truth that the idealisation of the main character, who thereby assumes the role of a textual sign, takes place. In this frame of reference, Henry of Flanders is more accurately defined as an ideal ruler and warrior rather than the Emperor of Constantinople of 1206–1216.
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Using the example of early modern English astrological and astronomical texts such as the medical case books of Simon Forman (1552–1611) and Richard Napier (1559–1634) and the treatise Astrostereon by Edward Gresham (1565–1613), as well as dramatic works, this text discusses the relationship between Renaissance astrology and epistemology in the context of celestial influences on the human body. Michel Foucault’s categories of ressemblance and signatures, and the metaphor of a seal in wax, are employed to demonstrate the semiotics of the human body in this period. The primary assumption of the article is the ordering function of the sciences of the sky in the Renaissance, which ensured both social and cognitive order.
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A diary from the only trip to Italy ever made by Maurycy Dzieduszycki (1813–1877), a conservative Galician writer, historian, art connoisseur, and politician. The author describes the sights and monuments visited during his travels, as well as meetings, mostly with representatives of the clergy, church dignitaries, and Poles who lived in Italy. In Florence, he visits the youngest (among his thirteen children), a 14-year-old daughter treated there for tuberculosis, who dies the day of his arrival. He is assisted with funeral arrangements by his friend, Teofil Lenartowicz, a Polish poet and sculptor established in Italy. One of the reasons for Dzieduszycki’s trip to Italy was a private audience with Pius IX to update the Pontiff on the assistance for the Uniate clergymen who fled to Galicia from the diocese of Chełm abolished by the tsar in 1875.
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The article polemicises against the book’s catchword, Human Being as a Sign. The author accepts the slogan but makes an essential correction: human being is an opaque sign, le signe opaque. Apart from systemic, foreseeable threads, human biographies quite often–virtually, always–introduce elements that disturb the model solutions. The author analyses this phenomenon based on the lives of two literary critics, Józef Rosenzweig (1865–1951) and Zygmunt Lubicz-Zaleski (1880–1967). The former apparently tried to escape his Jewish identity, more or less efficiently; the latter, in spite of his impressive education and extraordinary personality traits, was enchanted by the ideals of the National Democracy and the one who developed them – namely, Roman Dmowski. While the juxtaposition of these two men is rather coincidental, they share certain regularities: as it appears, the ‘Jewish question’ was in the twentieth century not only an object of journalistic and political disputes but also a real biographical problem, a task to revisit and rework on one’s own.
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The article presents the main conclusions from the sociological research conducted in 2014–16 among the foreign students from Eastern Europe and Asia at the University of Warsaw (UW). The authors argue that the UW represents a “classical” university education, the aim of which is reproduction of one model of subjectivity: a citizen related to a one-culture national state. The foreign students, though, are representing quite a different model of socialization. While in the European social world this is an individual, who is in the centre, striving to be autonomous and independent, in Eastern civilizations a notion of “Me” is based not on an individual subjectivity, but on the ability to launch a and support the relation with “Other”. The authors argue that a new model of education should be taken into account at the UW: a Dialogue Centered Learning (DCL) program, which takes into account these differences in the perception of an individual and the world in the East and West.
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The article titled "Small fatherlands, big fatherland and emotions – about their connections in present Poland" refers to diverse dimensions of functioning of individuals in society. The author confronts two patterns: one, built of the idea of the national community – determined mainly by the romantic tradition (the metaphor of “national wardrobe” seems to be a good image of the complex relations) and second, built on the idea of identity ties(the metaphor of the “wardrobe of identities” reveals the dynamics of individual social activities). Emotions – in this context – are situated in the diverse local and regional centers of public activity; the space implies the ontology of contemporary understanding of the nation. There are three context described in the paper: 1. remarks about two meta-theoretical wardrobes, 2. remarks about small fatherland treated as the social and cultural space, 3. remarks about the „essence” of small fatherland and its places of cultures of emotions.
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In this text the author reflects on the semiotic existence of culture discourses in connection with the rapid development of digital technology. The author analyzes selected texts of digital art as examples of the transformation in how works of literature, sculpture, or film exist. The article covers how movable font, which changes in shape and color, participates in shaping literary meanings; the creation of semiotic and interactive figures; the textualization of the user’s actions and body; dematerialization; processuality; narrativization; the temporalizing of sculpture which changes before the eyes of the recipient; the presence of alternative narratives in literature and film; multi-variant plots co-created by the recipient; and the artistic use of other discourses. The author proves that the structure and specificity of the digital sign lies at the base of the changes. The digital sign is immaterial, programmable, and hybrid, and combines aspects of expression, meaning, and action, which makes it efficient.
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