Rousseau: nature and the sublime

The metaphysical idea of “nature” is one of these tuning ideas of the philosopher of the Enlightenment, Rousseau. On one side, we see the romantic and wild picture of nature, like “the ocean, the mountains, the rocks, the waterfalls”, on the other side there is nature tamed by the humans. The mountain’s soul looked like phenomenon of unexpected (something which surpasses the expectations and reveal the dramatized, restless nature), is something which escapes its being (in the metaphysical sense) and which confronts this soul in a kind of terror. Also we underline that the sublime of the mountain provokes some sort of terror. The push of Rousseau’s thought shows nature as an association with the state of the soul within an internal experience. We can conclude that the “polarity of the subjective – (emotional) inner and of the objective external (the natural world)” opens the possibility to question this dispute.

Movement conceptualization in a series of similes of the Divine Comedy

The article presents attempt of a lecture of a series of similes selected from the Divine Comedy from the functional perspective. It means that we search the illustrative function of the series with respect to the cognitive passage of the protagonist from the mediaeval condition of alienatio through that of peregrinatio towards ordo. The condition change is observable in movement conceptualization in the three dantesque kingdoms. The basis for the observation is offered by similes which seem to form a pattern of meaning. After having drawn some conclusions about this function of the similes, we carry out analysis of two Polish translations of the Divine Comedy in order to identify the same characteristics, detected in the original, in those version of the Poem.

Autoportrait filmique d’un artiste – Le Testament d’Orphée (1960) de Jean Cocteau

Le but de l’article est d’analyser le film Le Testament d’Orphée (1960) de Jean Cocteau par rapport à sa dimension autobiographique. Magdalena Jałocha, en s’appuyant sur les conceptualisations de la pratique autobiographique, proposées par Philippe Lejeune, Michel Beaujour et Magdalena Podsiadło, repère des « signaux autobiographiques » que Cocteau a utilisés dans son film. L’auteure montre des motifs et des pistes thématiques qui se répètent dans le travail et dans des dimensions auto-textuelles de l’oeuvre cinématographique de ce metteur en scène. Magdalena Jałocha constate que ledit film où Cocteau-même joue le rôle du Poète (incarnation moderne d’Orphée), devrait être compris comme incarnation finale de ses concepts existentiels et esthétiques, comme autoportrait filmique de l’artiste et comme reflet de son imagination.

Epistemology and a new rationality in the early nineteenth century in France: the concept of point de vue

The purpose of this paper is to analyse how spatial experience is reformulated into the experience of the mental ‘horizon’, which reveals the process of conceptualization of point de vue (point of view). The review of French dictionaries and discourses from the early 19th century shows the ambiguity and semantic haziness of the term point de vue. It also shows the evolution of the metaphorical use of the term: from spatial experience (the sensory perception of space and location) to a cognitive category (the mental processing). The point de vue becomes in this way a heuristic element introducing an ‘intellectual view’.

From a bowl of milk to the cosmogony. The semantic analysis of the motif of milk in Claude Simon’s novels

The article proposes to analyze the semantic network of the noun “milk” in the corpus comprised of seven novels by Claude Simon wrote after 1957, in a period of his fascination with formal experiments, and published by Editions de Minuit. Interest of the paper is focused on the representation of human being (especially of women) as an organism with milky traits which connects it closely to the aquatic element. The reflections on the watery character of man are based on the work of French philosopher Gaston Bachelard and his conception of the four elements.

Moralists and their collections: La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, Mme de Pringy

The article is based on the review of works by three authors : La Rochefoucauld, La Bruyère, and Mme de Pringy. Following brief consideration of the status of the author and moralist, the author tries to demonstrate their works to be collections of thoughts and reflections moral in nature and, as in the case of every collection, never constitute a complete work. Like curios in a cabinet of curiosities, reflections and portraits in the works of moralists are continuously changing in line with intentions of the collector, who adds or rejects fragments, or changes their sequence.

Merchant ethos in Il libro dell’arte di mercantura by Benedetto Cotrugli

In her essay the author focuses attention on the problem of merchant ethos presented in the 15th century Benedetto Cotrugli’s tractat Il libro dell’arte di mercatura. Analysing the norms of comportments of honest merchant, to whom the tractat is dedicated, the author of the essay describes qualities typical for the merchant morality of that age, related to both to the Christian faith lay traditions. The dissonance between this values characteristic rather for the medieval mentality and the willingness to gain profit is less and less dramatic, and the figure of merchant, based on the perspective of the others members of society, less ambivalent morally. The commerce, i.e. the art of dealings, becomes the value in her self because is usefull for all of the citizens, and the merchant’s practices become appreciated if made according to the professional ethic.