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.

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.