We value the things we own, create hierarchies of them, exchange them for others. However, there are some things whose loss we would never forget, because they are our inalienable possessions.

Following upon Merlin Donald’s claim that human specificity emerges in history, and not exclusively in evolutionary time, it will be suggested that the diversified means of producing semiosis created by human beings account for the spread of empathy and altruism not only beyond the kin group, but to humankind in general. This amounts to treating other cultures as different from us, but still able to enter into communication with us (as an Alter), as opposed to treating these cultures as being part of nature, and thus only susceptible to being communicated about (as an Alius). Starting out from the theory of bio-cultural evolution defended by Peter J. Richerson and Robert Boyd, as well as from the multi-level selection theory of Elliott Sober and David Sloan Wilson, we try to lay bare the way in which semiotic structures play a role for transforming cultural evolution, contrary to biological evolution, into human history. We inquiry into what makes the existence of Alter-culture possible, if, as Sober and Wilson have claimed, armed with game theory, an altruistic society (an Ego-culture in our terms), is only possible in opposition to another group in relation to which group egoism rules (that is, in our terms, an Alius-culture). We will follow Michael Tomasello in arguing for the primacy of games of cooperation, rather than competition, while adding an historical dimension, which serves to explain how such cooperation can be extended beyond the primary group (our Ego-culture). However, we will insist on the importance of multiple semiotic resources for the boot-strapping of empathy and altruism, as well as on the genesis of this process in cultural encounters, as reflected in the spirit of the Enlightenment.

The subject matter of this article constitutes the semiotic mapping of human of knowledge which results from cognition. Departing from the presentation of human subjects as world-model-builders, it places epistemology among the sciences of science and the sciences of man. As such the understanding of epistemology is referred either to a static state of knowledge or to a dynamic acquisition of knowledge by cognizing subjects. The point of arrival, in the conclusive part of a this article, constitutes the substantiation of the two understandings of epistemology, specified, firstly, as a set of investigative perspectives, which the subject of science has at his/her disposal as a knower on the metascientific level, or, secondly, as a psychophysiological endowment of a cognizing subject who possesses the ability of learning and/or knowing a certain kind of information about cognized reality.

Semiotics is the study of how signs are interpreted as references, and names are an obvious type of sign. Semiotics may therefore be considered a useful approach to all types of name study — whether personal names, place names, commercial names, or literary names. As described by C. S. Peirce, an act of reference consists of a sign (e.g., a word, word part, road sign, emblem, or simply a finger) and a referent (e.g., an object, conceptual model, or analytic definition). Furthermore, all acts of reference reflect one or more of three basic types of relationships: 1) similarity, 2) one-to-one correspondence, and/or 3) arbitrary convention. If a sign is interpreted as similar to a referent, it functions iconically. If it is interpreted as a designation or as caused by the referent, it functions indexically. If it is interpreted as referring to two or more indexical referents, it evokes related qualities and thereby functions symbolically. The primary interpretation of names is indexical. However, the purpose of this paper is to show how names, as signs, are also interpreted iconically and symbolically, even at the same time. Different types of names will be used to illustrate these semiotic functions.

For Plato, language was the way to cognize the universe. The philosophy of language, which was primarily initiated by Plato in the Cratylus, still has not received answers to the questions settled by this great Greek thinker. In fact, it just offered various solutions formed in different conceptions and approaches in the ancient, scholastic, modern and postmodern periods. The questions raised by Plato in his dialogue have been continued in various nativistic theories of language, especially in works of Noam Chomsky. Language—as it is seen by Plato, i.e., as uniting our inner world with the outer world, is a significant feature of humankind, is still underinvestigated.

The article discusses the issue of proper names defined as symptoms of culture. The first part is of a theoretical character and develops the theory of symptomatology of culture in the context of semiotics (Ch. Peirce), psychology and psychoanalysis (S. Freud and J. Lacan), and onomastics. Symptomatology of culture is a practice of interpreting a certain group of texts of culture and extracting common qualitative traits within them. This is especially in the case of those traits specific to them and often encountered, which could testify to particular serious and deeply-rooted social phenomena leading to their appearance. In the empirical part the author presents a way of using (onymic) symptomatology in practice to research modern culture. She uses the examples of popular psychological and auto-therapeutic guidebooks and treats them as linguistic symptomatic forms of the most significant linguistic and cultural phenomena along with their social causes and functions which are often dysfunctional or abnormal in character. The analysis comprises the most typical conceptual and syntactic constructions encountered in the group.

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.

The major part of the paper is describing practice of using oral history method in the “Grodzka Gate – NN Theater” Center in Lublin. This cultural center started collecting testimonies in 1995 and formally created the Oral History Program in 1998. Educational and artistic exemplars include most of activities there: using oral history as a background in exhibitions, artistic celebrations and long-term programs, commemorations (about Righteous Among the Nations, Holocaust Survivors etc.).

Marylin Diptych by Warhol consists of twenty-five brightly coloured pictures on the left and the twenty-five black and white ones on the right. Since Western cultures typically conceptualise space in terms of directional metaphors LEFT IS THE BEGINNING and RIGHT IS THE END, the common interpretation is that the colourful images represent Marylin’s life with the greyish ones corresponding to her death. One way of clearing some doubts concerning this interpretation of the work is to assume that the painter used reverse perspective, which he most probably knew from the art of the Byzantine icon.

The object of our deliberations is structuralism in literary studies, whose beginnings in Poland can be traced back to the thirties of the 20th century. It was developing at two centres at the time: at the Stefan Batory University in Vilnius, around Professor Manfred Kridl, and at the University of Warsaw. Structuralism was reborn in Poland in the sixties and it impacted all of literary studies; its main centres were: the Institute of Literary Research of the Polish Academy of Sciences and the Adam Mickiewicz University in Poznań. Focusing on the analysis of literary systems, it combined them with theory of text and interpretation of individual works, emphasizing their broadly understood linguistic, discursive and rhetorical properties. In the culmination stage of its advancement, it tackled the fundamental problems of our discipline, including those that were only starting to emerge, such as reception of literary works as intended by its structural properties, or intertextuality. Structuralism had (and still has) a strong impact on the entirety of literary studies in Poland. It also became a sphere of reference for researchers of the younger generation, who prefer newer methodological tendencies.

Professor Jerzy Pelc was the creator and long-time manager of the Department of Logical Semiotics, University of Warsaw. He also founded the Polish Society of Semiotics. He published six own books, among others Studies in Functional Logical Semiotics of Natural Language (1971; in English); he edited also dozens of volumes of Semiotic Studies and Library of Semiotic Thought. As Kotarbiński, his master, and Twardowski, the master of his master, Professor Pelc was a radical rationalist. This radical rationalism has linked him to atheism, anti-communism, a distance to politics, and a frown on the falsehood of public life. He was a great patriot – in his life and in his work. He considered himself a successor of the Lvov-Warsaw School tradition. In the field of metaphysics, Professor Pelc combined theoretical minimalism with anti-rationalist attitudes, including the postulate of precision and the requirement of criticism. The main field of his interest was logical – and broader: theoretical – semiotics. He advocated and largely developed the functional concept of signs. To traditional paradigms of research: historical, teleological, causal and prognostic ones – Professor Pelc has added a semiotic paradigm, determined by the question “What does it mean that p?”. Referring to the interdisciplinary fashion for interdisciplinary research, he conducted an analysis of the notion of INTERDISCIPLINARITY. In ontology, he analyzed the notions of OBJECT and CAUSALITY. In his approach, aesthetics was treated form a semiotic point of view: he sought mainly ways to logically rewrite its terminology. In particular, he reconstructed the main aesthetic notions: FORM and IDEOLOGY (of literary works), THEME, MOTIVE, METAPHOR and (literary) FICTION – as well as semiotic notions essential to the description of literary arts, namely the notions of ASSERTION and INTENSIONALITY. In the field of ethics, Professor Pelc declared himself as an advocate of the ideal of trustworthy guardian, which he took over from his teacher, Kotarbiński. In metaethics, he analyzed the notions of NORM, EVALUATION and HUMANITY. A master of Polish: beautiful Polish – he was certainly a true humanist.

The article tackles issues of the pedagogy of place, with a special emphasis on the urban context. On the basis of fundamental theses asserting that a city is a text (Vladimir Toporov) and that places are pedagogical (Maria Mendel) – the author concentrates on symbols. Definition of this concept, as well as de3 nitions of its particular exemplifications, create a theoretical basis for further practical considerations. Presenting methodology of a research project Reading the City (Czytanie miasta) conducted in the years 2015–2016, the author creates new research challenges for pedagogues. Presentation of wide variety of city symbolism, encompassing both cultural manifestations (towers, bridges) and a realm of nature (mountains, river), leads to proposed educational applications. Descriptions of realized animations based on research form a summary of this article.

This article examines the contribution of the Tartu-Moscow School of Semiotics to semiotic studies of history, with the main focus on the work of Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspensky.

This study utilizes semiotics to analyze Italian loanwords in Kyoto by focusing on their form and context of appearance. It commences by reviewing previous research on Italian loanwords in Japanese. Subsequently, a corpus of images featuring Italian loanwords, collected in Kyoto during 2022, is presented. The corpus serves as the basis for a comprehensive quantitative and qualitative linguistic analysis, allowing for a comparison with the findings of earlier research studies.

This paper analyzes the concept of context with a special focus on the context of communication. We suggest two ways of classifying approaches to the context of communication: (i) classifying approaches based on a number of relevant dimensions for analyzing context in social activities, (ii) classifying approaches, based on the dimensions of Peirce’s semiotics. We also discuss the use of collected corpora of language, especially multimodal corpora of spoken interaction, as an aid in studying context. Finally, building on the two ways of classifying approaches to the context of communication, we present our own proposal for how to analyze the main relevant contextual dimensions influencing human interaction and communication.

For several decades of the last century, semiotic arrangements enriched the sociology of culture. The aim of the article is to show the achievements of the empirical school of sociology of culture in the perspective of the significant semiotic issues on the example of selectively selected works of the eminent scientist Antonina Kłoskowska and the “Łódź school” which she created. Thanks to Antonina Kłoskowska, the empirical way of the “Łódź school” sociology of culture led from literature reception research to visual arts research. Her students made a significant contribution to Polish sociology of art, sociology of literature, sociology of film, sociology of theater, and visual sociology. The text attempts to sketch semiotic theoretical inspirations, a characteristic theoretical and methodological approach to the study of symbolic culture. The problems of research on the reception of works were described in the context of selected studies on film reception. The starting point was the empirical research of Antonina Kłoskowska regarding the reception of the screening of the Wedding (dir. A. Wajda, 1973).

In 2020, in Poland, a national commemoration of two eminent religious philosophers was celebrated: it was dedicated to the memory of Friar J.M. Bocheński O.P. and Pope St. John Paul II. In the paper, I recapitulate fundamental ideas of The Logic of Religion (1965) by the former author and sum up the key issues of the doctoral thesis The Doctrine of Faith in St. John of the Cross (1948) by the latter. I also mention St. John Henry Cardinal Newman’s Grammar of Ascent (1870), because in Polish translation this book is entitled A Logic of Faith. In order to compare those heterogeneous conceptions of religious faith I reach out to logical semiotics, and using its tools I try to find a symbolic meaning of religious speech that could be accepted equally by religious thinkers and by non‑believers. I propose to understand religious speech as having not only literal sense, and not only a metaphysical meaning, but also, as I claim, the power to activate values that guide human behavior. I hope this is a conciliatory proposition because it places semiotics on a neutral footing among religious dogmas. In this perspective, mysticism can be described as a pragmatic aspect of language that emerges when a user refers to a transcendent reality.

I assumed so far that the notion of historical thinking was a worthy and handy “sponsor” of meta‑historical enquiry. Therefore, I left both thinking and, in particular, historical thinking without even a quasi‑definition. In this paper I make an attempt to operationalize the notion of historical thinking using historical semiotics (semiotics of culture), a domain of humanities developed by the founding fathers of the Tartu–Moscow Semiotic School, Yuri Lotman and Boris Uspenskij. The association of cognition and communication not only enriches the study of language but also culture and historiography. Bearing in mind the meta‑historical contexts I found interesting, I significantly reorganized the lecture contents found in Uspenskiy’s Ego Loquens. This interpretation took the form of annotated diagrams, which represent and interpret key categories of Uspenskiy’s philosophy resultant from the semiotic concept of language and culture. Underlying it, there is the act of communication as both the act of anthropogenesis and the genesis of the subject of cognition. We point out the qualities of historical thinking which already flow from the qualities of thinking tout court. Along the way we introduce the problem of the status of the so‑called objective and virtual reality, typical of the philosophical aspects of historical semiotics and crucial for potential meta‑historical analyses.

The article highlights the significance of the first full English translation of Naqd al-Hitāb ad-Dīnī (Critique of Religious Discourse), one of the most characteristic and important works of the acclaimed Egyptian intellectual Nāsr Hāmid Abū Zayd (1943–2010). The work was firstly published in 1992 by Sīnā li-an-Našr in Cairo, coinciding with the beginning of the so-called Case of Abū Zayd (1992–1995), the campaign of Egyptian fundamentalists against the scholar. Abū Zayd’s critique of the dominant discourses and worldviews in the Arab world, created both by the Islamic fundamentalists and so-called Islamic left, has gained huge acclaim in the international academia but so far there has not been a full translation of the work into English (also taking into account the important role of the full German edition published by Chérifa Magdi and Navid Kermani in 1996). In 2018 Jonathan Wright’s translation was published by Yale University Press in the series “World Thought in Translation”. The edition was enriched by Carool Kersten’s scholarly introduction. The following article discusses the translation dilemma regarding Naqd… (e.g. problems with finding equivalents for Arabic semiotic and hermeneutical terminology utilised by the Egyptian scholar), giving examples of the choices made by the translator. Adding to it, the more general issues of the impact of Abū Zayd’s work on the contemporary rereading of Arab-Islamic turāt are analysed.

The article consists of two parts. In the first one (introductory) I recall—following Edmund Husserl, Stanisław Ossowski and Adam Schaff—the main formulations of the “principle of transparency of the sign.” In these formulations it is usually said about (1) the transparency of the sign regarding objects denoted by the sign (denoted, designated and/or named), or (2) the transparency of the sign regarding its meaning (respectively, events, states of affairs and facts designated by the sign). However, as Husserl pointed out, one can also speak about (3) the transparency of the sign in relations to the activities and mental states of the sign’s users (senders and recipients). After all, only due to the transparency of the sign understood in this way, it is possible for people to communicate with each other, thus the sign can also has an expressive and communicative function. In turn, the second part of the article (essential) contains a reconstruction of the Leon Koj’s approach; Koj gave a consistently formalized form to the theory of sign based on the principle of transparency— the form of an axiomatized logical system (using Quine's formalism from his Mathematical Logic). One of Koj's main goals was also to indicate the close relationship between semantics and pragmatics, and even the primacy of pragmatics over semantics. Formal-logical tools have also shown that the theory of sign based on the principle of transparency neither contravene The Law of Non-Contradiction (at least in its psychological formulation), nor contain or imply semantic antinomies such us antinomy of the liar. Because it is a theory easily negotiable with Alfred Tarski’s theory of language levels.