Hanna Szabelska

Moral philosophy in Poland and its linguistic foundations in the light of humanists’ and scholastics’ debates
This essay investigates the correlation between ethical concepts and linguistic theories as represented by mainly Polish scholastics and humanists during the Early Modern Age. The point of departure is criticism of the secondary literature and discussion of typical problems faced by researchers of this period, e.g. a lack of modern editions and the influential biased approach of previous studies of a Kantian bent. It has been argued that linguistic surface structures (in particular diff erences between a rigid scholastic style and an elegant humanist one) are not a reliable criterion to ascertain the correlation in question. Therefore some texts have been analysed in terms of semantic deep structures as reconstructed by L.M. de Rijk and J. Magee. By way of a conclusion, epistemological implications of radical bilingualism being a model example of humanist dynamic semantic structures are compared to a theory of pluralism developed by M. Lynch.

Between the Rainbow and the Crystal Glass: Echo in Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski as a Species of Refraction in the Light of His Commentary on Summa theologica by Thomas Aquinas

The aim of this essay is to highlight an important gap in the research into the works of Maciej Kazimierz Sarbiewski (1595–1640), Jesuit neo-Latin poet and philosopher, namely the fact that his still unpublished lectures on one God in three persons and on angels, held in Vilnius Academy in the years 1631–1633, have remained largely unexplored by researchers so far. The main thesis is that these thomistic commentaries can considerably deepen our understanding of the dialectical and theological context of Sarbiewski’s poetry. For example, they shed new light on his Marian imagery (inter alia, the usage of the invocation ‘purum sine fraude vitrum’), or on his way of avoiding the danger of the infinite regress of concepts as being similar to mirror reflections.

The argument concentrates on the figure of echo in two poems: the praise of Jan Karol Chodkiewicz and the ode Secunda leuca seu Vaca as influenced by a new version of the Litany of Loreto (Litaniae Deiparae Virginis Mariae). It makes use of the definition of echo as taught in the Coimbra Jesuit Aristotelian courses. The phenomenon of echo is taken together with other species of refraction: the rainbow and reflection (Aristotle, Posterior Analytics, 98a.24–29), and set against the background of new technologies, such as the production of crystal mirrors.